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

by Greg Aunapu

  At the time, Hank Blair was a sky marshal on the South American route, and no one can remember any other friend of Amy's named Hank.

  When Amy's camera had been found just weeks after she vanished, the one photograph it contained was of a white pickup truck parked in front of a brick wall. One of Blair's old neighbors said the agent owned such a vehicle at the time. Unfortunately, much of the early evidence in the case had been disposed of in the police property room years earlier, when a bumbling new police chief had attempted to clean house. So the old photograph was no longer available.

  One of the many contacts that had diverted the Billigs over the years was a 1992 sighting by a British detective who contacted a Florida associate to tell her that a woman named Amy Billig from Coconut Grove had been offered to him for prostitution in England. The Brit died suddenly, so could not add much further information, but his lead prompted a lengthy investigation into British biker gangs, called "Travelers." A documentary crew eventually brought Sue to England to continue the search for Amy, but were unable to find any more evidence linking Amy to Britain. Very likely, this began as some kind of hoax on somebody's part— either the deceased detective or the "Traveler" who offered him the woman.

  The Florida detective, Virginia Snyder, invested a lot of energy in the case through the early 1990s, however, and even turned up "Sunshine," the Outlaw biker woman who had seemed to be on her way to Coconut Grove so long ago. Sunshine, living in Orlando, was not Amy.

  Detective Jack Calvar, who had been assigned the cold case just a month or so before Blair's arrest, began looking back at the old bikers again. While he was handling 11 murder cases at the time, he had come to know and admire Sue Billig, and really wanted to bring some closure to the case. "I tell you this lady has balls! Some of the situations she's put herself into— well, it's amazing she's alive!" he says.

  He tracked down Willow Treeland—the Seattle girl who Sue had never actually seen herself, and had a police associate there send him a photograph. Treeland was not Amy, either. One by one the old loose ends were being tied up.

  Calvar met with "Geronimo," who told him he wasn't even in Florida at the time of Amy's disappearance. Finally, the detective found Paul Branch through his criminal records. The biker had been paroled after serving a second-degree murder charge, and was living in a small town in Virginia. Branch agreed to meet with him.

  Calvar flew up to Washington, D.C., rented a Grand Am, and dropped in on Branch on a dreary November day that forced the Miami agent to stop and buy a hat at a strip mall. His nut-colored skin drew stares, and he wondered if the Klan would appear to lynch him. It was a long drive through hilly farmland to where Calvar remembers "Branch was living in a trailer way out in the middle of nowhere. You had to take a dirt road off of a dirt road to get there."

  The road was potholed and rocky and threatened to smash the oil pan or break the axle of the car. He navigated through two gates to get to the trailer, which was surrounded by engine blocks, mechanical debris, and a rusted pickup truck on blocks. When he finally parked in the driveway, he found the place guarded by two Rottweilers and several large chows.

  "The biggest dog I've ever seen, a giant chow, jumped right on the hood of the car and started growling. You know these dogs, they don't bark, they just bite."

  Branch let the dogs have their fun for a few minutes before he trundled up to the door, propped himself on a cane, shooed away the dogs and motioned the detective up to the trailer.

  Calvar was surprised at what he saw. He had pulled Branch's arrest record and photographs, and was prepared for a giant of a man. Instead, the old biker had layers of fat hanging from his frame, his skin covered with enormous pizza-like lesions. One eye had been amputated completely. "Skin cancer," Branch groused. "Who the fuck woulda told me I was going to get it twenty years ago? All this shit from driving a damned motorcycle!"

  They leaned against the rail of the landing outside the trailer where Branch lived with a girlfriend and her two daughters. Calvar glimpsed the inside and saw a bookcase filled with videotapes, ashtrays piled several inches high with cigarette butts, and an unused mop and broom standing against the wall among what he describes as ‘insanitary conditions.’"

  Calvar, a former Navy man and a recreational biker who had rubbed elbows with a few one-percenters in his time, kept his attitude very low-key and humble. "I could see he was dying, and you don't get anywhere with these guys acting like a police officer. I just told him what I was doing and asked if he could add any information."

  The interview lasted two hours, with Branch giving Calvar a very detailed account of his 1979 trip to Tulsa and getting shot by the rival bikers. He maintained that he had not actually kidnapped Amy off the street himself, but had met her at a biker party where she was being mistreated. He had taken her up to Orlando, where they lived together before he went back to jail. He described how he had given Amy and his bike to Dishrag Harry to keep while he was gone. He easily identified a picture of Amy as the girl in question.

  "He was still very hard-core," Calvar says. "His memory was amazing, and he remembered details of things that had happened in 1974. But he wouldn't admit that he had actually picked Amy up off the street. He never said he'd done that."

  The mean old biker, Calvar says, seemed mellow and introspective and told him, "I'm not so proud of some of the things I've done in my life, and I'm sure I'll have to pay for it."

  Paul might have been sorry for "some things," but he would never admit much of the following, which has been pieced together from sources who wish not to be named.

  Branch went to jail in Powhatan Correctional Center in Virginia in the early 1980s on a second-degree manslaughter charge. Facing a fifteen-year sentence, he began "snitching" on former accomplices, where sources say he was probably paid in the realm of $1,000 to $2,500 for each person who was convicted.

  The biker's cancer first appeared while he was in jail, where he was operated on. His teeth were removed and the tendons in his eye were cut, which made it impossible to open his eyelid without using his fingers. Eventually, he went blind in that eye. He was soon diagnosed with Hepatitis C, and rheumatoid arthritis in his hip, spine, and legs.

  His snitching paid off, however. He was paroled in 1987 after serving one-third of his time, and probably continued working with authorities to bust his former buddies.

  He met his girlfriend through another inmate and began a correspondence with her. She agreed to take him in, where he apparently doted on her daughters and "was a good surrogate father" for over ten years. He lived in constant pain, however, and became hooked on Demerol. His illness progressed until he was in extremely bad shape by the time he met with Calvar.

  Several months later, when British documentary producers came looking for Branch, on Calvar's tip, they found only the biker's "old lady." She told them Paul had died two months after Calvar's interview, on New Year's Eve. But she also laid down a bombshell. Branch had made a deathbed declaration she wanted to tell them about. Fearing repercussions from Branch's associates, she claims, she did not agree to let her name or face be shown, though they were. To protect her privacy, we'll call her "Tootsie." Whatever the case, her words would make international news. But were they really true?

  The producers flew Sue up to Washington, D.C., then drove to the small Virginia town, where they met Tootsie at a gas station. Sue thought, Oh my, another character! The middle-aged woman had curling neck-length hair, a wide face, wore glasses but no makeup, and a long-sleeve flannel shirt. She looked completely harmless, except that she had a Magnum .357 stuck in her belt.

  They drove to Tootsie's trailer, where they set up the cameras in front of a dinner table. Tootsie took Sue's hand and told a story which she characterized as Paul Branch's deathbed confession.

  She said Amy and a girlfriend showed up at a Pagan's biker party in Miami, where "the drunker she got, the more drugs she did, the mouthier she got with this fella. And he got upset." She said the biker lost face wh
en Amy "got to running her mouth to this guy. He got very upset and started knocking her around." She stopped, worrying about Sue.

  Sue told her to go on, she could take it.

  "He started passing her around to these different guys," Tootsie said. "The more she would be with these fellas, the madder she was getting. And the mouthier she was getting, the more she was getting knocked around. Basically, what I was told really killed her was an overdose, she was doing drugs on her own free will before, and it was just a party and everything was fine until she started mouthing off. He didn't tell me directly what happened to her body, but he did make mention many times of how it was so uncivilized in Virginia, because they didn't have anywhere to hide the body, in other words they used the alligators in the swamp. He used to say things like, 'It scares him to think of things like that, that happen to women. Women are such victims and they have no real sense of danger until it's too late.’” Tootsie was implying that Amy's body had been cut up and fed to alligators in the Everglades.

  With this image in her mind, Sue finally broke down and cried. Even the producer reached across the table to pat her arm.

  Sue questioned why, if this was true, Branch had contacted her so early in the investigation, and driven all the way to Tulsa, where he was nearly killed looking for Amy.

  Tootsie said Paul had just been leading Sue on to get money.

  And most amazing, she told Sue that Amy was killed 'the first night," the same day she disappeared, which was supposedly "the night of the party" which Paul had attended.

  Jack Calvar and others were eager to accept this explanation. It put to rest a mystery begun a quarter century earlier. Dying declarations are considered highly reliable by law enforcement and the courts; as there is no reason for a person to lie when they are going to the grave, so many people unburden their guilt held for a lifetime.

  But Tootsie now claims that when the producers brought her into the car, they paid her two hundred dollars, which she says she put toward Branch's funeral. Most news organizations will not pay for an interview because it tends to make people enhance their stories, to make what they say "worth" paying for. And Tootsie is no exception. Now she admits that this information was no dying declaration at all, but gleaned from things Branch told her after Calvar's first interview.

  After several letters back and forth, Tootsie wrote Sue that "I just wish I'd of talked to you and not a camera. The part [the producers] played in this was monetary and not in keeping with what I consider real concern for you or your feelings. Or for my safety." She insists that the producers promised that her identity would not be revealed, even though it was. Now she carries her gun at all times.

  Further indication of the producers' manipulation was shown at the end of the documentary, where they taped Sue mourning at the family gravestone where Ned is buried and Sue's own name appears. The producers asked Sue to have Amy's name inscribed on the gravestone, reading, "Amy, January 9, 1957—March 5, 1974."

  Josh was incensed. "I couldn't believe they made her do that, and then had her go out there in the rain so they could get a final shot."

  So basically, Branch's confession was not a dying declaration—it was told second hand, by someone who accepted money for the interview.

  Attempts to reach the producers for comment proved unsuccessful. Phone numbers have been changed and were not answered by man or machine. One producer died in September 2000.

  More questions come immediately to mind.

  How did Amy get sidetracked to this biker party by a girlfriend when she was on her way to meet her father and her friends—alone? How did Paul identify Amy's appendix scar, which had never been reported? A girl dies at a party, after which there is widespread media coverage looking for her, and no one ever picks up a phone to say she's dead and gone, including the so-called girlfriend who brought her there?

  If Amy died that same day, what about all the sightings? Casey Lange saw her in the biker bar in Fort Lauderdale. The Majik Market owner identified Amy in Kissimmee. Sue found hair matching Amy's in the brush in the Kissimmee apartment. Why would Paul lead Sue all the way to Tulsa and nearly get himself killed if he knew Amy was already dead? Okay, so he got some free legal representation, and meager travel expenses, but the Pagans had lawyers on the payroll, and it was always easy for bikers like Branch to make money by selling or transporting drugs and guns, or by pimping. And even now, his Miami lawyer Rex Ryland remembers that Paul had a stable of girls. Branch was also an "enforcer" who could earn money by breaking bones or even by killing or snitching. Squeezing a few bucks out of an ever-broker Billig family just wasn't very cost effective. And his last telephone call to Sue, giving her the Seattle tip, was initiated by him out of the blue and earned him nothing.

  The party story holds about as much water as your standard sieve.

  It was obvious that this story was put together by someone who did not know the details of Susan's adventures. Calvar and several detectives before him had been looking for Pompano Red, Branch's roommate and best friend, for years. When I interviewed Calvar shortly after the Blair trial, he told me, "I heard Red had cancer. He's probably dead."

  Half that statement was true. Red survived throat cancer and was living in a modest two-bedroom CBS house in Hollywood when I found him.

  The old biker would no longer scare anybody. The meat was wasted from his body, leaving skin and tattoos hanging in leathery folds around his bones. A throat operation made his words sound like someone shoveling gravel. At sixty-five, the bones of his chin, nose, and cheeks bulged against his skin like an aged Popeye. During our conversation, he drank cup after cup of instant coffee, mixing it with tepid water from the tap, and paced from room to room, sometimes disappearing for several minutes at a time, then reappearing again to talk after his temper simmered down. He cleaned the counter almost obsessively, maybe a holdover from his life as a U.S. Marine before his biker career. Despite his appearance, his mind was keen, and his manner educated, even though he tried to talk like a biker.

  "Paul was the meanest son of a bitch alive," he said. "He'd just as soon kill you as look at you." He described an event in a bar where a fellow biker gave Paul a bad look. "Paul just took his gun out, put it to the guy's head, and pow-pow!" He mimicked a gun with his hand. Paul and his friends tried to hide the body in a Dumpster. In the end, Branch went to jail for that particular crime, and Red did time as an accessory.

  And Red remembered Amy well. "She was Paul's girl," he said, "no doubt about it." He said he knew people were looking for her at the time. In fact, he admitted, "I drove her to Arlington, Virginia, in my van."

  He was hazy about exactly when, as it really meant nothing to him at the time, and these guys did a lot of drinking and drugging. But he had nothing to gain by admitting he transported a kidnapped girl across state lines.

  “What was she like? Did she say anything? Did she know who she was?”

  "She was not lucid," Red said. "She was out of it. Drugged up and hardly said a word." Bikers didn't look at women as someone worthy of conversation, either. One thing he insisted on, however. He believed then, and still believed now, that Amy was a runaway, and not a kidnap victim. In Virginia he gave the girls to another biker, who "brought them up to New Jersey."

  Finding Red was very important to the story because he was the only one alive who admitted seeing her, speaking with her, and being in such close contact with her, making the identification at a time when the story was still fresh. His account conclusively dispelled any lingering suspicions that Hank Blair's obscene obsession stemmed from a guilty conscience.

  Here is the story the way I see it: Paul, just out of jail, with little cash in his pocket and no woman, was cruising through Coconut Grove on that balmy afternoon with his fellow Pagans or even riding with Outlaws, with whom he had a relationship. He picked Amy up off of Main Highway (either by force, or by what she thought was an innocent lift), drugged her with pills, as the bikers were known to do, and spirited her up the h
ighway.

  Branch was one of the arguing bikers in the bar where Casey Lange spotted Amy.

  Paul hid out in Orlando and may have even called himself Creature at the time, where he may well have helped the Outlaws set up his Pagan brothers for the kidnapping and murders. That's when Amy became the mysterious Majik Market customer who bought vegetable soup and crackers. When Paul had to go back to jail, he sent his bike and girls—Amy and the other one—with Red, to hook up with Harry. Pompano Red couldn't keep them, because he was going back to Homestead.

  Amy survived for a time, and was probably in New Jersey when Miami lawyer Martin Blitzstein said he located her there. By then she had probably witnessed too many crimes, had too much knowledge of the bikers' illegal activities, and may have remembered her kidnapping when the drugs wore off, for the gang to let her return to her family. Since the case was so well-publicized, they probably sent her out West into hiding until the heat subsided, as it always did.

  But Sue Billig never quit or allowed the story to cool. At some point someone, somewhere, decided that Amy was too much of a liability. She may even have died of an overdose, as no human body can stay drugged for so long without suffering any consequences.

  No doubt, the overwhelming majority of the sightings described in the thousands of letters and telephone calls to Unsolved Mysteries and other leads were cases of mistaken identity. Every day I see gorgeous young girls walking down the sidewalk, in animated conversation with friends, who I would easily swear were Amy if I were a well-meaning citizen who had only seen her photograph in a news story a day earlier.

  But could every letter be a mistake? Even the ones from bikers? Branch's story at the time, which he told many people over and over again and repeated to Calvar years later, combined with Pompano Red's recollections, mesh too well with other known facts.