Word: billig
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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WHEN THE PHONE CALLS CAME, THE Voice was low and menacing, the messages cruel. I've cut out Amy's tongue. Sometimes Susan Billig clung to the line, pleading for news of her daughter who had disappeared in 1974 at the age of 17. Amy will be sold off at a livestock auction. At other times, the mother hung up. But the connection was never really severed. You know who this is. Whether the calls came seven times in a night or once in several months, the Voice haunted Billig every hour of every day for nearly 22 years, jolting...
Finally, however, that merciless voice may be silenced. Working off a tip supplied by Billig, investigators traced a series of incoming phone calls to her one-story stucco home in the Coconut Grove enclave in Miami to a cellular phone owned by Henry Johnson Blair, 48, a U.S. Customs special agent with 24 years of distinguished service. Last month Dade Circuit Court prosecutors charged Blair with three counts of aggravated stalking and alleged that he had admitted to harassing Billig over the past 18 months. After Blair pleaded not guilty, he was freed on a $75,000 bond. Now investigators...
...Billig still remembers the first time she heard the Voice. On the day that Amy vanished while strolling to her parents' art gallery in Coconut Grove, Billig and her husband Ned alerted the police and the press, bought extra phones and placed pads and pencils by each extension. When the first late-night call came some 10 days later, Billig answered. "I was trying to spare Ned," she recalls. That night, Billig scrawled the first of the many meticulous notes she would still be filing away chronologically two decades later. Within a month she could recognize the caller...
...Billig would not be diverted from her search for Amy. When police interest waned and community donations dried up, she and Ned financed their own hunt by closing their art gallery, selling their Bentley and moving with their son into a smaller house. They tracked bogus leads to Oklahoma and Nevada, visited the Seattle headquarters of a motorcycle gang rumored to have snatched Amy, persuaded Texas officials to exhume an unidentified body and got Unsolved Mysteries to air a TV segment on the case in 1992. After Ned died of lung cancer two years ago, Billig, who also suffered from...
...Though Billig has received no calls from the Voice since Blair's arrest, the memory still disrupts her thoughts and sleep. She has not given up on Amy. "It's my job to find my child," she says. "I won't rest until there's some kind of closure." She adds, "Either they find her alive--or they...