VOICE OF THE TORTURER

By Jill Smolowe

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."

But 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 the disease, still prodded the fbi and local police to stay on the case. "She'd be a good cop," says Miami homicide detective Jack Calvar. "She knows how to work the system." Her voluminous notes and recordings of Johnson calls will be key to the trial. "She's tiny, just about 5 ft. tall, but she'll blow your head off," says Calvar. "I think she wants [Blair's] head--understandably."

Blair's admirers are adamant that he could not be the obsessive caller. Colleagues describe him as a model of moderation, the kind of guy who drives a fuel-efficient Honda, jokes breezily at lunchtime over a fried fish sandwich and iced tea and indulges in one vice: late-afternoon candy bars. At day's end he hurries home to his condominium in Kendall to fix dinner for his two daughters and wait for Cynthia, a hospital administrator whom he married two weeks before Amy's abduction. "Hank is one of the most down-to-earth, common-sensical, likable people you would ever meet," says an agent at the Customs building in downtown Miami, where Blair specialized in drug interdiction and supervised 17 agents before he was placed on paid leave. Until his arrest, Blair was best known for helping to recover a 1636 painting by Peter Paul Rubens, stolen from a Spanish museum. That won him Spain's highest civilian honor. Now, a conviction for aggravated stalking could earn him 15 years maximum behind bars.

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 don't."

--Reported by David Beard/Miami

With reporting by DAVID BEARD/MIAMI