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 her awake in the morning, mocking her attempts to find her daughter, robbing her of any peace ... a mother-daughter sex team ... Billig could not let go of Amy, whose birth seemed such a miracle after four miscarriages. You'll be abducted like your daughter and sold into a slave trade. She did not dare change her number. The Voice that tormented also held out the hope that Amy might yet be alive, trying to get in touch.
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 are racing to reconstruct Blair's movements on March 5, 1974--the day of Amy's disappearance--trying to discover if Blair was Amy's abductor as well as Billig's late-night caller. When his trial, scheduled for next month, opens, Blair's wife and two daughters expect the affable family man, known to colleagues as "Hank," to be vindicated; Billig is certain he will be unmasked as the caller who has tortured her all these years under the phone name "Johnson."
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. "He was obsessed with me," she says. "He hurt me. I went into therapy because of him."