One afternoon in March 1974, 17-year-old Amy Billig came home from school, changed clothes and headed for her father's nearby art gallery to get money for lunch. Construction workers in her neighborhood, in Miami's Coconut Grove section, saw her walk by. Then she vanished.
Like the parents of thousands of other American children reported missing every year, Susan and Ned Billig wavered between hope and dread as they spent their waking hours searching for their daughter. But her disappearance in itself was only one cause for their grief. Another was the telephone calls that came at night, from a man who claimed to be the abductor and who described the things he was doing to their child.
Those calls continued, off and on, for 21 years.
To this day, Amy Billig remains missing. But in October some of the calls were finally traced to Henry J. Blair, 47, who has now pleaded not guilty to the felony of aggravated stalking of Susan Billig and is scheduled for trial next month. Asked whether Mr. Blair was a suspect in Amy's disappearance or instead had undertaken a two-decade-long campaign of harassment after reading about the case, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation would say only that an inquiry was continuing.
Mr. Blair, married and the father of two children, is a decorated 24-year veteran of the United States Customs Service, a special agent who oversees drug interdiction at the Port of Miami and on the Miami River. That surprising twist has once again prompted headlines here about the case, which perplexed this city long before the problem of missing children became a leading national issue.
Organizations that help search for missing children say it is not unusual in highly publicized cases for the parents to receive harassing calls. But both they and Federal law-enforcement officials said they know of no other case in which the harassment occurred over so long a period.
"I had him, on top of everything," Mrs. Billig, now a 70-year-old widow, said of the caller. "He took away 21 years of my life when I should have been concentrating on finding Amy."
Amy disappeared two weeks before her high school graduation, one of roughly 4,000 American children a year reported to have been seized by strangers. For the next two decades, the Billigs engaged in a cross-country search that required them to sell many of their possessions and to close their art gallery, to talk to death-row prisoners and motorcycle gangs, and to follow leads in Seattle, Oklahoma and Nevada.
Throughout the ordeal, the one constant in their lives was the caller -- Mrs. Billig describes his voice as "low, threatening" -- from whom they began hearing within weeks of the disappearance. In one call, according to court documents filed in the case against Mr. Blair, the man told Mrs. Billig that "she would be abducted like her daughter and sold into a slave trade." In another, he told her she only had two weeks to live.
The caller never demanded ransom. Mrs. Billig, who took most of the calls and taped some of them, said that "he wanted a mother and daughter sex thing." Often she would hang up on him. But sometimes she would talk to him for a couple of minutes, begging him to "have a heart." Once, when she asked him to put her daughter on the phone, he said he had cut out Amy's tongue.
Mrs. Billig says she always had the sense that the caller was watching her. He knew when her husband died of lung cancer two years ago and when she too fell ill with the disease.
Twice they agreed to meet, but the caller never appeared.
Mrs. Billig never changed her telephone number. "I wanted her to be able to reach us if she had to," she said of Amy. "I feel the same way now."
Investigators say that despite the number of calls, tracing them was difficult because many were made from pay telephones and because they came in spurts. Sometimes the man would call as many as seven times a night. But months would go by before he called again.
Then, in October, several calls were traced to a cellular telephone and Mr. Blair. He now faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of the aggravated-stalking charges, which deal with calls made in March, April and May of 1993 and this October. Despite his not-guilty plea, state prosecutors say in documents filed with the Dade County Circuit Court that Mr. Blair has admitted making such calls for the last year and a half or so.
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