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

by Greg Aunapu

  He described Sue's arduous search through the years, and continued: "There was one constant while all this was going on, one constant in Susan's life, and that constant was a stalker—a telephone stalker—by the name of Johnson. These calls from Johnson started coming really early-on after Amy's disappearance. Horrible calls, threatening calls in the middle of the night… The caller told Susan, 'I have your daughter, we're torturing her, you're next, watch out. We've cut out her tongue…'” Rosen detailed all the terrifying telephone calls that Susan had endured through the years and explained why she never changed her telephone number—because it was the only link that Amy might still have to her former life.

  Blair sat at the defense table with his hands clasped together, steepled up to his flaccid jowls. His eyes darted to the prosecutor or the jury, but mostly stared directly ahead, one eye twitching. His wife, her elderly parents, and his two daughters sat behind him, sometimes whispering together, but all exhibiting the stern faces of people who couldn't believe their family member was being tried for making such a small mistake.

  Rosen steadily put the case together, explaining how the cell phone number was traced to Blair, telling about the agent's powerful confession, and continued with how the cell phone records would prove the Customs agent had called Billig at least fifty times in the last five years alone.

  In his only dramatic act, Rosen walked over to Blair and pointed at the frowning culprit. "So, folks, it was this man right here—Henry 'Hank' Johnson Blair— who was the man who Mrs. Billig was at Burdines looking for that night, 7,891 long, torturous nights after her daughter disappeared. It is that man who is the aggravated stalker, and you are going to find guilty after hearing the evidence in this case."

  Defense attorney William Norris rose and walked painfully over to the dais, as if struggling to comprehend what he had just heard, and rested his arms on the podium. "Ladies and gentleman, the prosecutor has woven for you a terrifying yarn." He took a dramatic breath and admonished the jury to remember what the judge had said—it wasn't evidence. the problem is there is other evidence in this case that you're going to hear that call into question much of this universe that the prosecutor has woven for you in telling this yarn, and that Susan Billig has told...”

  Norris continued to tell them that the tape-recorded telephone conversations would “put the lie to much of what the prosecutor has suggested that Susan Billig is going to say to you from the stand. I'm not saying this woman doesn't believe it, I'm not saying this woman doesn't have some of it written down. But those telephone conversations show that it's not true…”

  Norris told them that the conversations would prove a different version of events. "My client, Henry Johnson Blair—'Hank' Blair—is accused of doing some very vile things. And indeed he has done some things which are terrible. Hank Blair has done some bad things, but he's not a bad man, I submit to you. You're going to hear that he's had a twenty-five-year career in federal law enforcement. That he's married. You're going to get a chance to meet his wife on the witness stand. He has two daughters. His family continues to support him. I'm not asking you to support him in this case. I'm not asking you to find that he's a good man, even though he did terrible things. Because a trial, although it's many things in many contexts, it's not a popularity contest, okay? I'm not asking you to find that Hank is a great guy. I'm not asking you to decide that you'd like to take him home to dinner or that you're going to give him your telephone number. [Here, journalists in the room almost cracked up.] And I'm not asking you to think that Sue Billig, a woman who is clearly tormented, and has been tormented for over twenty years by the loss of her daughter, is anything other than the person who is entitled to your profound sympathy…”

  Then: "The point is that this case is not about making telephone calls. This case is about the contents of the communications that go on in the telephone calls that Hank Johnson made to Susan Billig…”

  As expected, the lawyer questioned the words "credible threat," saying that, in the wording of the law, 'the threat must be against the life of, or a threat to cause bodily injury to, a person." So was there ever a credible threat against the life of Susan Billig? "I think you'll find that there has not been!" he declared.

  He went on to tell about Blair's Customs career: The agent was "engaged in the war on drugs…" He dealt with the stress "with booze . . . and "made obscene telephone calls, though he fought valiantly against it." But when a victim told him not to call back, he would hang up and never call them again. Billig, he insisted, was a "different kettle of fish" who welcomed the calls.

  He downplayed all of the early calls. The only important calls were the recent ones that had been recorded, he said, but the threats couldn't be "credible," because Hank Blair had never said 'I' will do this to you, but that the "Arabs" would. He said that the legislature had written a law requiring a "credible threat" and "a credible threat is absent from this case." He took his seat.

  Now it was time for the prosecution to bring on their witnesses. Of course, Sue would be first to take the stand.

  -21-

  S ue took the stand, wearing a dark jacket over a white silk blouse. Her hair was dyed a dark brunette, matching her simple onyx earrings. This was the first time she had ever testified in court, and she'd been worrying about it for days. She hadn't slept, hadn't eaten, and was fighting one her of powerful migraines. By the time she appeared in front of the jury, she was wiped out, completely enervated, and wanted to get out of the court as soon as possible. To top it all off, the air-conditioning was on the blink, and it was stuffy and hot inside the courtroom. She spoke in low, quiet tones and looked sweet, demure, and nervous.

  To establish why Sue did not have notes of Blair's earliest calls, Andy Hague asked her to explain about the confusion surrounding Amy's disappearance in 1974. The prosecutor wanted the jury to understand just how important the leads generated through the telephone were, so that when Blair had begun calling, Sue hadn't told him to go to hell right there and then.

  Hague asked about the content of the calls.

  Sue sighed and told the jury, "They all kind of sounded the same, like an ongoing story, like a bad soap opera. He would pick up from where he left off on a previous message."

  "Please tell the jury what the caller would say back in the seventies."

  Sue spoke slowly, pausing between each sentence, remembering the terrible hurt that had accompanied the telephone calls. "That he—or 'they'—had Amy, that she was their slave, that he was training her, that he was making her a valuable commodity. Things like that. Kind of disgusting . . .”

  "Was there any pattern when this 'Hank' or 'Hal Johnson' would call?"

  "When he called—he would call consecutively for a couple of days, and then he wouldn't call for a couple of months. Then he'd call again and start over again. He knew so much about me, that's what frightened me."

  Hague asked her to explain how Johnson had compelled her to travel up to Fort Pierce in 1979 on his misinformation. Over a period of a couple of hours, Hague made her relive the entire story of her life: the Tulsa and Seattle trips—the cancer. It was very difficult for her, but she knew how important it would be for the jury to hear everything from her own lips, so they would truly understand how all-consuming her passion was to find Amy.

  Back to the telephone calls. Hague asked if there was a distinct pattern.

  "No," Sue said with difficulty. "It was like a story. He would keep on calling me, and say things like 'I have your daughter and she's in a slave trade,' a livestock auction; and that he had trained her, and that they had seen me, and now they wanted me, and now he was going to be my trainer, and I was going to be a slave."

  To counter the defense's argument that Sue was making up calls that hadn't occurred, Hague asked if she had written down every telephone call. She responded that she hadn't because:

  "He would call at three, four in the morning. He called me when my husband was dying beside me—I was sick…" Later in her testi
mony she recalled the time immediately after Ned's death. "After two weeks, he called and knew my husband was dead. He seemed to know a lot of things about me. I had the alarm system updated, installed a chain on the door, slept with my windows closed. I was frightened for my life."

  They went through the Burdines episode and Johnson's recorded calls.

  Why did that frighten her?

  "The fact that he said he wanted me now, and I presumed that all the terrible things through the years that he said about Amy he was going to do to me."

  "And the portion about wanting a couple generations of nipples to play with?"

  "Well, that really frightened me."

  "And did there come a time when you told him not to call anymore?"

  "That's the one where he said they wanted me now. 'They've seen you and they want to work out a trade…’ I told him that if he had nothing real, meaning something important regarding Amy, I didn't want him to call me or bother me again. Except for a hair sample or a picture, which I had been begging him for always…”

  She identified her notebook, which was entered into evidence.

  With prompting from the prosecutor, Sue explained to the jury, "The thought that someone was doing this to my child made me physically sick, I was throwing up all over the place, I was just beginning not to be able to handle it anymore. The talk had gotten to a point where it was like violent. As he spoke to me, the calls became progressively more violent, and more personally against me again. For instance, if he's saying he did these things to Amy, and that he wanted me now, I presumed that he was going to do all the things he said he had done to Amy to me, because he said 'they want you now.' I offered to trade myself for Amy, and he said, 'No, they want you both.'”

  All this time, Blair sat twiddling his fingers, occasionally glancing at Sue, but mostly staring forward or up at the ceiling. His daughters and in-laws sat behind him in silent support.

  "Did you enjoy talking to Hank Johnson?" Hague had to ask.

  "No!" Sue exclaimed in horror.

  Hague drew a diagram of all the calls on the large pad propped up on the easel. It showed the continuing pattern of harassment.

  Finally, Hague played the actual tapes for the jury, allowing the court to hear Blair's even voice emanate out of the speakers. This was the conversation recorded right after Sue, Agent Phipps, and Detective Hernes returned from Burdines when the defendant had failed to show.

  It started mid-conversation with Sue's exasperated voice, "Why is it too dangerous? I don't understand you. You told me to meet you! I got up out of bed. I don't understand you. Don't you realize how important this is to me?"

  Blair: "It is important. That's why I keep calling…”

  As the tapes were played, Blair sat with hands clasped at his chin, fingers touching his nose, eyes closed. His girls sat behind him with straight, utterly unmoved faces, listening to this disgusting conversation perpetrated by their father. Sue, reliving the moment, had difficulty holding back the tears, but she did not want to break down in court.

  After a brief exchange of questions, Hague played more of the tape—a section where Blair said he wanted Sue and would be her sexual trainer. Tears swelled in her eyes and a bailiff had to bring her a handkerchief. She wasn't the only one, however. At one point a female member of the jury also began to cry.

  Hague knew the defense would question why Sue's voice sounded so strong during these taped conversations, if she was indeed scared for her life, so he preempted that by asking, "How did you portray yourself?"

  "Well, I wanted to act like I was strong," Sue said. "You don't show the enemy that you're weak. At this point I thought he was my enemy. I felt that if I fell apart, I wouldn't be able to put it together again."

  Hague completed his examination two wrap-up questions later, then said, "No more questions, Your Honor."

  Bill Norris stood at the lectern, his first question launching an assault on Sue. "In recent days have you talked to the prosecutors about the elements of the offense of an aggravated stalking?" He paced back and forth.

  "Can you be more clear?" she asked him.

  He faced her directly. "Did the prosecutors tell you that there had to be a credible threat against your life?" He was apparently trying to make the situation look like Sue had fabricated her fear in order to make the charges stick.

  Sue shook her head. "They didn't tell me. I looked it up."

  He tried to pin her down, asking if she had ever told the judge that she was in fear. His questions were worded so snidely that Hague objected and requested a sidebar discussion with the judge. The sidebar lasted several heated minutes before a marginally more subdued Norris continued his questioning.

  "Your recognition about a threat to your life or a threat to bodily injury is an element of the offense charged."

  "I understand that."

  "When did you come to that understanding?"

  "I don't know when—"

  "Well, was it yesterday?" Norris prodded.

  "No."

  "Was it last week?" the lawyer wanted to know.

  "It was probably the time that the police people or the phone people told me about the stalking law."

  "It probably was?"

  "I don't know for certain, no. I didn't know that that was what all this was about."

  "You don't know that's when you decided that that was an element of the stalking law?"

  Sue was quickly becoming aggravated. "I didn't decide anything."

  "Well, did Hank Blair ever threaten to kill you?"

  "Not in those words, no. But he threatened to do to me what he said he had done to my daughter, and cutting out her tongue and treating her like a slave.”

  "Did he ever tell you—" Norris interrupted.

  "Am I allowed to finish, sir?"

  Hague objected to the interruption, and Judge Ferrer admonished Norris to allow the witness to finish her response.

  Sue continued, "What I perceive as a threat is when someone tells me they've done all these monstrous things to my child, cutting out her tongue, putting her into a slavery thing, selling her to people, and then he says to me that they want to do the same things to me, and that he is going to train me, and that I am going to be his slave. Yes! I do perceive that as a threat to me."

  "That's your perception of a threat. You define it that way?" Norris asked.

  "That's my perception," Sue replied, and added, "I'm not a lawyer," as if indicating that Norris was obviously far too devious to define that sort of conduct as a threat.

  Norris asked several questions to ascertain if Blair's statement that he had cut out Amy's tongue was not actually voice-recorded, only written down in her notebook.

  His voice became accusatory. Are there any conversations at any time where anyone except you, Susan Billig, have heard what Hank Blair said to you?"

  Sue was incredulous. "Are you presuming I'm lying?”

  "Yes!" Norris quipped.

  "Well, the presumption is wrong. I don't lie."

  "Good," Norris snapped. "Answer my question. Where—"

  "I just did answer you."

  After a bit of give and take, Sue said, "I swore to tell the truth."

  "Well, let's talk about swearing to tell the truth for a moment," Norris said.

  "Yeah, let's," Sue said, letting irony drip from her words.

  "This is a very difficult thing for you, isn't it? "Yes."

  "Tremendously emotional?"

  "Yes."

  "And you're almost seventy-one years old?" "Yes."

  Norris asked whether, in that case, her faculties were good enough that "we have to accept as gospel everything you've said?"

  "You don't have to accept anything I say. I'm telling you what I say is the truth."

  Norris took that as an opportunity to pick apart a small statement in her journal about the Fort Pierce trip in 1979. She had written down that Blair as Hal Johnson had given her a bogus telephone number to call. On the stand, she said Blair had given
her only an address and not a telephone number.

  Norris gleefully showed her the telephone number written in her notebooks from fifteen years earlier and concluded that her memory obviously could not be relied on to be accurate.

  Besides that, the main thrust of Norris's argument was that since "Johnson" had never followed through with the meetings that he had set up with the Billigs at their Grove art gallery, or in Fort Pierce, or at the Taurus, or later at Burdines, didn't she think everything else he told her about what had occurred to Amy must be a lie?

  Sue didn't agree at all. It was a quantum leap of logic at best, but Norris pressed on with his point for several questions until prosecutors objected with an "Asked and answered!"

  With that, Norris concluded. His main weapon would be Blair himself, and he obviously didn't want to give the witness too much stage time.

  After Sue's testimony there was a short recess in which Blair stood up and exchanged smiling pleasantries with his two daughters as if nothing strange was happening around them. The family group looked so at ease, no one just entering the courtroom would have suspected that they had just finished listening to the emotional testimony of the father's long-suffering victim.

  When the trial resumed, Hague was granted a short redirect in which the prosecutor allowed his frustration with the defense to tinge his words. "Mrs. Billig, can you estimate the number of phone calls you received from Hank Johnson over the years?"

  She shook her head. "No, I can't figure it out," she answered quietly.

  "Did you tell this jury the truth when you said that Johnson said he had cut Amy's tongue out"

  "Yes, I did, sir."

  "Did you tell this jury the truth when you said he said he wanted a mother-daughter team?"

  "Yes."

  "Is it fair to say that the only other person who would know what came in those phone calls was the person on the end of those phone calls? Mr. Johnson, correct?”