by Greg Aunapu
"Yes, sir."
Hague had made his point. "No further questions, Your Honor."
It was now six P.M. Sue had sat so long in the witness chair, she could barely get up, and had to limp out of the courtroom.
Sue, being the prosecution's main witness, wasn't allowed in the courtroom from that point on. Lawyers invoke "the Rule," which keeps witnesses who haven't yet taken the chair out of the courtroom so they can't modify what they're going to say. Sue could read about the case in the morning's paper and hear about it from friends, but the only time she would be able to look Blair accusingly in the eye was during her own testimony. She wouldn't even be allowed to remain in the courtroom when her tormentor took the stand, to hear his excuses in person, in case she needed to be recalled later. It was very frustrating for her to sit at home and paint her nails and clean the house while such an important part of her life went on without her.
After Sue, the prosecution's other witnesses were mainly just supporting the case. Executives from AT&T Wireless testified that under several layers of bogus companies the cell phone number with a particular serial code was assigned to Customs. Customs officials in turn had to verify that that cell phone belonged to Henry Johnson Blair.
Customs agent Walter Wilkowski testified with difficulty (since Hank was his friend) that Blair always knew what he was doing, and that while he had occasionally seen his boss drink, he had never seen Blair get drunk. Prosecutors wanted this on the record to blunt the defense's later argument that Blair made the calls because he was an alcoholic with psychological problems.
FBI agent Harold Phipps was called in to tell the jury how scared Susan had been during the calls, how long he had been hearing about them, and how the calls had been taped after the Burdines incident. He had since been transferred to Atlanta, and flew down for the trial dressed in his customary light gray suit and striped tie. He was comfortable and low-key in the courtroom, exuding a paternal aura, rather than that of a secret agent.
He told the court that each time Sue called him after she heard from "Johnson," that "she was pretty hysterical… She was becoming frightened, and as time went on became even more frightened... It was her feeling that he was lurking outside her home. She felt that he knew where she lived. After her husband died, the calls became more frequent…”
When Blair finally confessed, Phipps said, "I was stunned. I was startled. I said, I guess I have to advise you of your rights.' " He sighed, and told the jury that arresting another law enforcement officer was one of the most distasteful things he had ever done.
Norris cross-examined the agent and asked if he had ever been in the room at two in the morning when Sue received a telephone call.
"No," the agent answered gravely.
"Did you ever hear him threaten her?" Norris questioned.
"No," Phipps answered.
"That's all," the lawyer said, making his point that everything Sue was saying was hearsay.
Prosecutors rested their case. The next day, the defense would let Hank Blair tell his side of the story.
-22-
T he following morning, instead of beginning their defense, one of Blair's lawyers, Fritz Mann, delivered a surprising request, asking for a mistrial because a female juror had cried during Sue's testimony. This was, in some court observers' opinions, plainly a nervous reaction to Sue's powerful testimony of the previous day. The lawyers, rattled, were trying a desperate gambit.
The judge sat back in his chair and admonished the lawyer, "I am aware of absolutely no authority for questioning the jury because they are moved by some of the evidence! I don't think that there's ever a requirement to be selected for a jury and be expected to be completely unemotional or have no reaction to evidence. Jurors frequently sit there and show emotion, whether it be tears or open crying during trials. If the evidence moves them that way, then that's what it does."
Howard Rosen offered the State's view. "The analogy that I'll draw is the situation in a homicide case, where a jury may see grotesque photos that shake them up, but that doesn't mean they can't be fair and impartial in the case. It doesn't mean they form an opinion about the entirety of the case. It just means that particular thing that they are seeing at that moment affects them in one way. These people are human beings, not androids."
The judge said, "I agree with the State. Under the situation that you're describing, where a juror cannot display any emotion, is viewed as a suggestion that the juror should be disqualified in some way, shape or form . . . the most horrendous defendants, the ones in history charged with the most egregious acts, would be constantly absolved of responsibility because no jury could sit there stone-faced and listen to the evidence. I don't know of any legal authority that says that is a requirement. If you're aware of any, I'd like to hear of it."
The judge refused to declare a mistrial, but agreed that he would question the jury about whether they had heard or read news reports about the case that may have biased them. But he certainly wasn't going to question them about their emotional status.
Their daring gambit turned down, there was nothing else for the defense to do but bring on Blair. While the defendant cannot be required to take the stand—and a jury is always told by the judge that failure to testify is not an admission of guilt—the defense had some things they wanted the jury to hear from Henry Johnson Blair's own lips.
Blair took the stand wearing a charcoal suit, a white shirt with a tight collar that made his neck cellulite bulge, and a burgundy tie with little snowflake-style designs. His speech was very "good ol' boy" style, using simple words, but—without being in the league of, let's say, Hannibal Lechter—he seemed to be hiding a higher intelligence than his speech pattern would suggest. He leaned back and frowned between questions, with his right eye twitching uncontrollably behind his eyeglasses.
A line of questioning laid a base that the defendant's upbringing, following his father from base to base, had kept him from making friends and set him apart as an outsider. He then went on to tell about every position he had ever held during his career as a Customs officer: from sky marshal to undercover officer and finally the supervisor of his marine-narcotics group unit. Who could be afraid of this valiant guy?
Finally, Blair admitted to making many telephone calls to Susan Billig. As before, he said he got her name from the Miami Herald, and blamed his actions on the pressure of drug interdiction work and his alcohol abuse. He tried to stop himself from making the calls, but the compulsion always came back. "As I got older, the problems became worse," he said. Eventually, he began to doubt his sanity, and even contemplated suicide, twice sticking his automatic pistol in his mouth, a hairbreadth from pulling the trigger. He referred to his arrest as an "intervention."
"I always considered myself a person of strong will," he said. "I could stay awake long periods of time. I could endure pain, stuff like this, driving boats at night in heavy seas. And basically, I would will myself not to make these calls. But as I said, it's almost something that you don't have any control over, and it keeps coming back again and again and again. The thought process just reoccurs and reoccurs, it's stuck like a video, stuck, stuck, it runs again and again and runs by you, and you feel like knocking your head against the wall after a while."
One question brought this response: "I feel like I'm a pilot in a nosedive, and I'm trying to pull back on the lever to get it up, and I'm trying to restrain myself not do that. There's like a logical part of my brain that says, 'what are you doing… what are you doing?' Don't do this, you know?"
Sometimes he could restrain himself, but not always. "After the calls, there was always a feeling of shame. It's horrible, it's like getting burned, you're trying to rush away from it, get it out of your mind, and trying not to let it overpower you. And when you're with people and you get these thoughts, you wonder if they realize what I'm thinking here." He spoke in a frenzy, gesticulating with his hands, smiling crookedly and seeming to enjoy the clandestine memory. "I may look like I'm norm
al, and they talk to me like I'm normal…" He trailed off.
He said that he started using the cell phone because "it was a subconscious way to end security measures." Most important, the defense wanted the jury to hear him declare that he never had any intention of harming Sue Billig. Now he was using the drug Zoloft, was feeling quite a bit better, and could control his compulsion and understand what had made him act so maliciously. He said Sue had twisted things in her mind, and that just by coincidence the calls that had been recorded were "the outer limits, the ultimate of the worst" things that he had ever said.
He said he had spoken to the Billigs about Fort Pierce in 1979, but had never actually told her to go up there, and "certainly never would I say I would meet you there, you know?"
Blair accused Sue Billig of being an enabler. He only became so outrageous, painting the scenario of Amy's tongue having been cut out, for instance, in order to get Sue to hang up on him and stop taking his calls. "Her obsession [to find Amy] was melting into my obsession. I was trying to get her to say, ‘You're crazy, get out of my life, get lost.’” When his other victims hung up, he said, he always felt a "sense of relief."
A few wrap-up questions later, Norris finished his questioning on a low note.
Hague popped out of his chair like a horse from the gate to begin his cross-examination. He was impatient, aggressive, spoke quickly, and was obviously disgusted with Blair's testimony.
The prosecutor shot out some rapid-fire questions about how many times Blair had met with his attorneys to plan his testimony.
"Seven or eight times," Blair admitted.
Through questioning, Hague sought to establish that Blair was basically doing no more than improvising from a script laid out by the defense. Hague probably couldn't believe that the defense wasn't objecting— there's nothing legally or morally wrong with meeting with your council—but as long as they didn't, he kept going.
"Now we first met on October twenty-seventh, 1995, is that correct?" Hague wanted to know.
"Correct."
"And that was at the Customs office?"
"Correct."
Now the defense objected to the former "script" line of questioning, and asked that those questions be struck from the record. After a sidebar, it was agreed, and the prosecution leaped forward again.
Hague painted a picture of their first meeting and established that Blair lived within a few blocks of the Arvida Middle School and Crossings Village Shopping Center, where some of the pay phone calls had been traced.
"When we first started talking, Agent Phipps wasn't there yet, was he?" Hague asked.
Blair's eye started to twitch spastically. "No."
"When I first spoke to you, before the FBI agent got there, you didn't know that any of your calls had been recorded on tape, did you?"
The defense blasted the court with objections about that line of questioning.
"Overruled."
"When I asked you if you knew Susan Billig, you said you did not, is that correct?"
"That's correct," Blair answered.
"Now, after Special Agent Phipps arrived, he introduced himself and brought out a small tape recorder and laid out the investigation for you, didn't he?"
"I don't know if he laid it out…”
"Agent Phipps told you that he had you on tape and asked if you wanted to listen to the tape, didn't he?"
"Yes."
"And you declined, and he asked you if you knew who made the phone calls, and you said 'Yes?’''
"Essentially, correct."
"Isn't it a fact, Mr. Blair, that when you first told Special Agent Phipps that you made the phone calls, you admitted to doing it for the last two or three weeks, initially?”
Blair thought about it for a minute, seemed to realize how bad he was about to look, and leaned forward to the microphone. "Let me say this. The two or three-week part is a blur, I don't know if I said it or not."
"Isn't it true that later on in the interview you said you'd made the calls for five, six, or seven months? Isn't that correct?”
Blair leaned forward again. "Counselor, there's a point where I remember saying something, but again, I was in total, total shock. And I'm not trying to dance around your question, but I don't recall that part, all right?”
"You don't remember whether you said it was five, six, seven weeks, then you changed it to five, six, seven months?"
Blair didn't remember.
"Do you recall when you admitted making the calls for a year and a half, two years?"
Here, Blair nodded. "I remember that, yes."
"That wasn't the truth, Mr. Blair, was it?"
"Yeah, it was the truth, I had called the last eighteen months, certainly."
"But it wasn't the whole truth. Because in actuality, you'd been calling a whole lot longer than that? Isn't that true?"
"Yes, I had been calling longer than eighteen months."
"So you were minimizing your involvement, weren't you?"
Blair leaned forward, nodded and sighed. "Was I minimizing my involvement?" he asked thoughtfully. "Again, let me say this. I was in total shock. I admitted making the calls. I remember saying eighteen months. Did I have a desire to trick you at the time or anything? No, I don't think that's accurate."
"So when you told me originally that you didn't know anything about Mrs. Billig… you didn't have any desire to throw me off then?”
There came a long period of give and take, with Blair admitting again to making the phone calls as far back as 1979, the first time his pseudonym of "Hal Johnson" appeared in Billig's notebooks, but wouldn't admit to any earlier calls than that. He admitted to calling from pay phones and from his cell phone. A lot of material from previous testimony was regurgitated without any real point except to get certain facts on the record. Hague let Blair ramble on a bit, while the lawyer studied his notes.
Then Hague went into the content of the phone calls, and made Blair explain the ploys that he had used to keep her from hanging up on him, such as how he kept dangling a carrot in front of her by promising to reveal more facts.
At one point Blair said that "technically" he really knew very little about the Billig case.
"But you knew enough to dangle hope in front of Mrs. Billig, didn't you?"
"Well, let me say that I never had a preconceived notion that I was dangling hope in front of somebody…”
"You knew that Mrs. Billig was looking for her daughter?"
"Yes."
"You knew that she was turning over every rock in search of her daughter?"
"No, I didn't know that."
"But you knew that she wanted to find her daughter?"
"I knew that she was missing and that it was a mystery, and that she was interested in pursuing it."
Blair would begin sentences, cut himself off and start on another tack. He peppered his dialogue with "you know" and "like this," would repeat phrases a few times before continuing. Finally, he accused Billig of "just altering things in her mind, too," and of misreporting things in her diaries, though he did admit to calling her at least a hundred times. But again he accused Sue Billig of wanting to hear from him because she was obsessed with the search and didn't "want it to end."
He said he really wanted to be caught, and even once sported a beard, which he shaved off after he started using the cell phone to call her. "I was just tired of hiding. I figured sooner or later…” he would be apprehended.
Hague countered that this statement was ridiculous because the cell phone was registered to a dummy corporation, which offered complete anonymity. Blair said it never fooled the Colombian drug dealers, who had great counter security measures. "We were hoping it would work, but you were about the only person it defeated."
During one heated exchange, Blair insisted, "There was no preconceived notion of intent to harm or harass. And certainly there was never an intent to threaten!"
"You learned about that being an element of the crime since you were arrested, didn't yo
u?" Hague queried.
Blair leaned back, looking exasperated. "The answer most clearly in my mind—I never conceived that anyone could think that I was threatening their life. I was overcome with shame, I was in shock, and this and that, but as I said during my arrest, I thought I was making these phone calls to alleviate the pressure of these two diseases. I never had any mal thought of any kind." He continued to insist it was "a way to get rid of these demons in my head," thereby placing the blame on something besides himself.
Blair maintained that he had painted himself as "a fringe person" in the stories he had invented about Amy.
Hague jumped on that statement. "On the tape you say 'I'm' the one who trained her, didn't you?"
"Yes," Blair conceded.
"So you didn't always use the third person, did you?”
Blair pounded on the witness stand. "That was the one exclusion right there. That's what I said before, almost all the time, that was the sole exclusive exclusion at that time!"
"So the one time they got you on tape," Hague scoffed, "that was the sole time in sixteen years that you did not use the third person?"
"That's absolutely correct, counselor," Blair said evenly. During later questioning on the topic, Blair tried to bolster this argument by saying that Sue Billig had reported conversations about the slave trade in 1993 that had really happened shortly before his arrest in 1995. "If she wrote them down in 1993," he admonished, "she must be clairvoyant."
Questions designed to show that Blair knew what he was doing all the time continued to rattle the defendant, making him raise his voice as he insisted on his "fringe, third party" position, and that pressures and alcohol drove him to make the calls.
Then Hague asked, "Your feeling was that this was a game, isn't that true?"
Blair looked away, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, looking a bit like Rodin's Thinker. "You know, I guess everything's a game, narcotics is a game, an obscene game…" He waved his hands and clutched his head. "Other people said the logical thing, 'Drop dead, asshole.' But she talked and talked and talked, you know."