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

by Greg Aunapu

  Hague was incredulous at the quoted statement.

  "What crime did Mrs. Billig commit? Answering the telephone in hopes of finding her missing daughter? Hoping to solve the riddle that had been gnawing at her brain for twenty-two years? Hoping against hope that this evil person has the answer? She didn't commit a crime, yet she has been locked up for all these years. Afraid to go out of her house, not knowing where her daughter is, being tormented time and time again from the phone calls from this defendant."

  He sighed, took a moment to compose himself, then argued that Blair's telephone calls had to constitute a credible threat and a crime. "Defending one's country does not give him the right to put Mrs. Billig through hell. And that's what he did. How dare he [Bill Norris] try to say during his closing argument that because [Blair] was an American centurion, this protector of our shores, that that gives [Blair] the right to do what he did!”

  Hague told the jury that the judge would instruct them that Blair's argument of insanity and alcoholism, and "the devil made me do it," should not be taken into account. "What's next?" he continued, sitting in the witness chair and mimicking the defendant. "Don't find me guilty because it's a bad hair day? Too much caffeine, can't find me guilty!" His speech dripped with disgust.

  After several more minutes, Hague told the jury that after they reviewed all the testimony, they had to "remember the facts, remember the threats, remember the background. There is only one verdict for you to return on those items, and that is that this defendant is guilty on aggravated stalking on all three counts. There can be no other lawful verdict. I thank you for your kind attention." He swung away and picked up his files.

  "Thank you, Mr. Hague," Judge Ferrer said.

  After a break, the judge gave the normal jury instructions: that they should basically look at the evidence, make a determination on conflicting evidence, elect a foreperson, and the many other technicalities. The two alternate jurors were dismissed before deliberations began. Six would go into the room to decide the fate of Henry Johnson Blair, who slouched at the defense table twiddling his thumbs.

  -24-

  I f Hague and Rosen felt confident of their prosecution and a quick decision of guilt, it was the defense whose hopes escalated with questions from the jury room. They wanted a transcript of Blair's testimony (which they were entitled to have read back to them in court, but which they couldn't read themselves, as the testimony hadn't been translated into text yet); they wanted a definition of the words "willful and malicious," as they are used in the statute (a definition which didn't exist); and they wanted the easel and flip charts created by the attorneys during the trial (which, by law, they weren't allowed). The judge and lawyers looked up the legal terms of "willful and malicious," agreed to them in court after a lengthy debate, and sent them back to the jury.

  The jury deliberated for five and a half hours the first day, and well into the afternoon on the second day, when the judge received a note:

  We have agreed on the verdict on two of the three counts, but we cannot agree on the third count.

  How should we complete the verdict sheet based on this?

  Nerves were high in the courtroom. The judge asked the lawyers whether he should issue an Allen charge, which would instruct the jury that they could indeed come to a verdict on two charges, but they must try one more time to come to a verdict on the third. Since each of the charges was so similar, this didn't look good for the prosecution.

  The judge called the jury back into the courtroom and instructed them to write down their verdicts on the first two charges, then go back into the jury room and individually discuss the merits or weakness of the evidence on the third count. If they still couldn't agree on a verdict, the judge told them he would declare a mistrial on that one particular charge. Not long afterward, the jury sent a note to the judge that they were ready to declare the verdict, minus the third count in question.

  Sue Billig, of course, was allowed to be in court for the verdict. She sat with an old friend, Michael Samuels, a Coconut Grove lawyer who would shortly be elected a judge himself. Various reporters and visitors also attended.

  The defendant and William Norris remained in their seats as the clerk, a young, slim, African-American woman with orange hair, lots of gold jewelry, and long fingernails, read the form in a toneless voice. “…we the jury find that the defendant is guilty of stalking as a lesser included offense of count One. The defendant is guilty as a lesser included offense of count Two, on this sixth day of March in Miami-Dade County Florida…”

  Mrs. Blair and her seventeen-year-old daughter, sitting directly behind the defendant, fell into each other's arms, the young girl weeping. Blair and Norris sat stone-faced, though Blair's thumbs did stop twiddling for a moment. Hague put his head down and rubbed his forehead. It may not have been the favored verdict for the prosecution, but it wasn't the verdict the defense hoped for, either.

  Sue sat in shock, her stomach in knots, in disbelief at the verdict. The sounds of the courtroom took on a homogenous roar. "What does that mean?" she whispered to Samuels.

  The white-haired lawyer squeezed her hand. "The lesser counts are misdemeanor charges. One year max on each," he told her. "They can still retry him on the third count, though."

  She stood up in a daze. Blair, too, stood, never once letting his eyes fall on Sue. His daughter threw her arms around his neck and hugged him close. He kissed her teary cheek, telling her everything would be okay, then kissed his wife on the lips.

  The bailiff fingerprinted Blair. He took off his tie, his wedding ring and watch, gave them to his wife, hugged her again, wiped the tears gently from his daughter's cheek, and was taken into custody.

  As Cynthia and her daughter made their way down the hall outside the courtroom, television cameras assaulted them. The seventeen-year-old screamed, "We've suffered enough! Can't you guys leave us alone? God"'

  A female African-American jury member told reporters that she had not felt that the calls were life threatening, but that "I just didn't want him to go free and nothing happen to him, because I believe he should've paid for what he did to this lady."

  Two weeks later the court resumed for sentencing. Blair stood in front of Judge Ferrer in an orange jumpsuit, looking humbler than the last time he had appeared in court. The judge declared that Blair would be incarcerated for 364 days on each misdemeanor count, for a total of just under two years. He pleaded guilty on the third count, which Susan Billig agreed to, for which he received five years of probation and counseling.

  The judge brought Billig up and asked if this sentence was okay with her. "I mean, I'm only interested in accepting this plea if it's okay with you," he said.

  Sue, ever the one to turn the other cheek, said, "Absolutely, that's the way I feel. I don't want to hurt anyone any more than they have to be…" Outside the courtroom she told reporters, "The family is ruined, and I feel very sorry for them. I feel I can sleep through the night now, and my son doesn't have to circle my house with a weapon anymore."

  Sue waved the cameras away and walked over to where Cynthia and her daughter were standing away from reporters. As the click of her heels echoed in the hall, she knew she probably wasn't welcome. But she, of all people, knew what it was like to have a family in turmoil, and felt that she had to apologize to Mrs. Blair, to let her know woman-to-woman that no malice was intended. Cynthia, wearing a beige linen suit, was broad-shouldered and six inches taller than Billig, but Sue had confronted massive bikers without fear, and felt none now.

  "I just want you to know I don't want to hurt you, I don't hate you, I have nothing against you…”

  Cynthia took her hand from her pocket and patted Sue's arm. She declined to speak to reporters at the time, but later told Court TV she had "absolutely no malice toward her [Billig]. I hope she understood that I just don't think that people are disposable and we just couldn't desert him."

  Sue, on the other hand, felt hurt that during the entire proceeding Blair never once apo
logized, and had tried to blame her for his decade long obsession. "He acted like the whole thing was a game. He destroyed my life, but acted like the whole thing wasn't serious to him."

  Blair did his time in a fairly comfortable prison. He had his own room, about one-third the size of a room in a Holiday Inn, with clean, white concrete block walls, a single cot, a television, a stainless steel toilet, and, most important, a window, where he posted snapshots of his family. He was attacked and beaten by another inmate, and thereafter was confined to his room for twenty-three hours a day.

  A year through his incarceration, Court TV interviewed Blair in prison. The prisoner looked haggard and had lost a lot of weight, including the fat jowls. When the reporter asked him why he had never apologized to Sue, he turned to the camera and said, "For the record, Mrs. Billig, I am sorry. I mean, I don't know what else to tell you. It's meaningless to you. But I'm sorry, there was never any intent to hurt you."

  "Is that enough?" the reporter asked.

  "Well, it's not enough, but what is enough?" He held out his hands. "I mean you want me to cry out the ears?”

  Blair's lack of repentance would come back to bite him in the rear. Sue had entertained no further action at the time, and had never seen Blair testify on the stand. But when she heard what her tormentor had said on the stand, how he had blamed her for his illness, she decided to seek a civil judgment.

  At a deposition taken October 8, 1997, just short of two years after his arrest, and after he had been in jail for eighteen months, Blair, despite what he had told Court TV, obviously felt little remorse, if any.

  He disagreed with most of Sue Billig's testimony, saying, "You know, I have a lot of empathy for Mrs. Billig, but the way I look at it, her presentation is in two categories, over a period of time her sense of reality in memory is not as good as she thinks it is; and a lot of calls, a lot of people, a lot of problems, have mixed together and she is looking for somebody, something, to blame it on, and focus on; and, therefore, I was convenient, partially guilty. So she molded her story, her approach, to fit the moment."

  He continued, "And then the other part of it is her own lies. She made it up because it was better for her. The only thing I can think of is she, over a period of time—she has this quest, this desire, and in order—in her own way, she's a very astute woman, very practical woman, she's learned to become a constant actress, she plays to the moment.

  "She's learned how to kick the State Attorney's Office in the ass, how to get the Miami Herald to write an article, how to get all the news tabloids, magazines, shows . . . She has her names and she calls them up, she plays it.

  "She's had to drum up this interest and so, I mean, I think suddenly—maybe not so suddenly—she has learned to couch everything for her benefit, for the drama, for the coverage, for the money she might have made, or for the coverage of everything else, she needed to have a sensational story, so she changed the facts, you know."

  The lawyer asked if Blair considered himself at least "partially guilty."

  "Well," Blair said, "to me it would be easiest to ask in the adverse: what I'm not guilty of, you know. I never, ever threatened her. I don't threaten anybody. I never met her daughter. I never kidnapped her daughter. In fact, you know, you might say the use of the phone is sort of like a cowardliness, a long distance. A confrontation is not what I wanted. Meeting her or anybody else is not what I wanted…”

  Blair said he viewed the calls as shameful, but never realized they could be considered a felony. The most, he said, "I figured I might lose my job." Asked to play amateur psychologist on himself, he said he might have subconsciously wanted to lose his job. "The job was everything to me," he said, "but it was destroying me. It was destroying my family…”

  "Did you ever think about what effects your telephone calls were having on her?" the attorney asked.

  After all the time he had spent in jail, Blair characterized the calls in an interesting way. "To a certain extent, but you have to understand she was unique. She's the only one that perpetuated the game, so to speak, and she never seemed distressed. Like my lawyer at the time, Bill Norris, he listened to one of those tapes. He said, 'My God, the tenor of the tape, the intensity— she's breaking you!' It's almost like she was in a sense taking charge. You know what I mean?

  "It's like, you know, somehow I'm sure the State Attorney's [office] got ahold of my personal college records, and my only ‘A’ I made was in judo, and in judo I was a passive judo. I would go out and the person attacks, attacks, and eventually my body naturally felt the move and I would throw them and I was very good at it.

  "It's the same with her," he said. "A lot of times I felt she was actually dominating the conversation and what-not, you know. 'Oh, no, no, no, I want to be sure that you understand that I want you to call back at eight in the morning,' you know? 'I have an appointment to get my hair done at eight-thirty. I don't want you calling at 8:25. I want you to call at eight sharp.'

  "You understand? It's like—I mean, she was not in the role of a submissive. She gave as good as she got in our little judo stance, I would say." A couple of questions later, he continued, "I felt that she did not feel intimidated and, in fact, it was almost a contest, you know, she was playing chess, playing cards, maneuvering, so to speak. She was good."

  Blair insisted that he was always polite, that he never suggested they meet anywhere, and that Billig "put words in my mouth, altered what I said," to suit her needs. Shortly later he characterized Sue as "tough as nails. She's tougher than I am. She's very—I wish there was a nicer way to use the word—‘manipulant.’ She's very ‘manipulant’ naturally." He said, making up a word, then added that Sue would have made a good undercover agent.

  Did he ever fear getting caught?

  “…I had this toward the end. It was the end of the last year, I would wait almost for that tap on the shoulder. It's almost like intuitively I knew that this was disregarding every professional ethic in the world. It was almost disregarding instinct, you know.

  "When you do that, you're on the edge of destruction. It's a matter of time before the odds would come against you. In that sense, deep down I was waiting for it, but consciously saying, 'Am I going to get caught?' No, it's like a dichotomy."

  During this deposition he admitted that he had called many other women over the years and amazingly, "a certain percentage that wanted to meet and have an affair—that was a by-product." But he said he wasn't after that.

  Even though Blair must have suspected that he would stand to pay out a large judgment should he lose a civil trial, his statements seemed to show little true remorse. When asked again what he felt about Mrs. Billig, the former agent stated, "I feel ashamed of it. I think that, you know, I'll bear the scars and cross of it for the rest of my life. I feel within the confines of what I did, I have admitted. It doesn't make that right in that I have admitted to it, and I'm sincerely sorry for that, and I know this sounds… but I'm willing to pay the piper.

  "I'm willing to admit to what I did and I'll always have to bear the scar, but I do not want to be tarnished with something I didn't do. To me, it's important people know the type of crime I was involved in and the type I will not be involved in. I couldn't have killed the sheriff 'cause I was busy robbing the bank.

  "To me it's important for people to know what I did do, which was harassing. She was participating. She could have ended it like everybody else did, and for what I did to her, I'm extremely sorry."

  "Did you ever tell her that?"

  "No. At my sentencing I was going to say, 'Your Honor, I'd like to have a moment to speak,' and then her friends started saying this guy is a low scumbag, slimy lizard. I said, well, I might as well say nothing.

  "It was my intention to tell Mrs. Billig, for what it's worth, I'm sincerely sorry for what I did, and I'll always bear the scars of it, but nobody gives a shit but me about that, but I admitted to what I did. That to me is a step toward perhaps returning to a normal life, you know. But I also feel t
hat beyond that, she's not totally guiltless.

  "She played the game, she participated, she concurred, whatever. I think the woman—she's obsessive, too, that's my personal opinion, for what it's worth."

  But the most telling thing Blair said was during the middle of the heated deposition: "It even occurred to me she's not as innocent as she seems. Did she ever take a lie detector polygraph? It occurred to me, metaphorically speaking, she could have buried the kid in the backyard…”

  In January 1999, Blair settled Billig's suit against him for $5 million. Unfortunately, efforts to get his home insurance and other carriers to pay were fruitless. Having been forced into early retirement, even Blair's pension was a mere fraction of what it should have been. In the end the former Customs officer was ordered to pay between $6,000 and $7,500 a year.

  Sue Billig says, "He never bothered to apologize to me in person, so at least, once a year he's got to sit down and write out a check, and remember it, if only for that moment."

  Blair's lawyer, Bill Norris, consented to an interview, but did not return calls to set up an appointment. Blair showed up at Norris's office and picked up his file before moving his family to Tallahassee after he got out of jail. He did not respond to attempts to contact him.

  At this point Sue felt as if every strange thing that could happen in her life had already occurred. She would never stop searching for Amy, but she had now followed every conceivable thread to its bitter end and had to at least admit to a truce, if never a defeat. But if she thought her life would finally calm down now, she was mistaken. The epic case was about to become even more convoluted and novelistic.

  -25-

  M any reporters and detectives secretly hoped that Blair could be tied to Amy's disappearance, as it would be an amazing end to this long case. And there were some intriguing clues that whet their appetites. When Miami Herald reporter Meg Laughlin thumbed through some of Amy's old diary pages, she found a sentence reading, "Hank wants me to go to South America with him. I told him he's crazy."