April 4, 2019 • 30 mins
As the investigation begins, iO explores Billy's journey to New York City.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
I grew up in the East Village in Manhattan in nine.
I was born in nine and I came of age
really in the early nineties in an era of crack
and the city was dead broke. I grew up with
(00:23):
a mom who was a single, very outside the system human,
so we never had any money, and my whole block
was low income housing. I was born opposite a seven
person men's shelter. On the corner was a group home
for boys, which was like a stepping stone to their
(00:45):
future life. Across the street on the next block was
the Hell's Angels headquarters. So you have this confluence of
wildness and poverty and crime, and the police called our
block the asshole of the universe because it was just
the meeting point, that conjunction of every shitty, crazy, insane
(01:09):
thing that could happen. But the East Village, you know,
we were two blocks from CBGBs, which is the birthplace
of punk music. Jean Michel Basquez Studio was on the
next block, and Nan Golden, who's my godmother, was around
the block. So they all came there to make weird
avant garde movies and make No Way of music and
(01:29):
make punk and make strange paintings and do cocaine and
sell whatever weird ship they wanted to sell and reinvent
their identities. And I was just trying to figure out
how to have a play date. They chose to be there,
and I was born there. When I was a little kid,
(01:53):
it was just me and my mom. We were a team,
and I could find her, I could reach for her,
I could say something, she would hear me. We lived
in a house full of hand me downs, all my
closer hand me downs. We would we got a mattress
from her friend. Everything was self invented and created. But
we would play together. We'd go up on the roof
(02:15):
together and and make up imaginary stories and games. And
if I had an idea for something, I wanted to
start a newspaper. She'd started with me, you know, like
she was chief of a tribe of two. And I
loved her for it, and I respected her for it,
and I trusted her judgment. And then something happened where
(02:35):
she changed, And I remember the first night I saw
her change from alcohol, and she put her fist through
a window and started screaming, and there was just a
blackness that came into her eyes, and I couldn't find
her anymore, and she was my only connectivity to the
outside world. So I lived a life with a person
(02:59):
who never sat down. Her thing is I don't sit
down to this day, only rides a bike everywhere, does
not will not sit down. So we walked, and we'd
walk from Third Street straight and I'm seven, eight nine
years old, walking, you know, from fifty seven street to
street to rehearsal at eight pm, and then rehearsing some
(03:21):
terrible off Broadway garbage production of Oliver Twist or Charlotte's Web,
and then walking home at midnight, and like not knowing
whether or not the lights are going to be on
when we get there because funk the man. She doesn't
pay electric bills. And we have a cable running out
the window to the neighbor to keep like one lamp on,
but forget the fridge. I didn't learn how to use
(03:43):
silver ware till I was thirteen years old. Like I
was raised a wolf child, and I wasn't allowed to
close any doors. I wouldn't allowed to have keys to
my own house. I was seventeen, things got pretty dark.
Sometimes would just lay in the bathtub and whale crying
out for Billy, the love she lost three years before
(04:06):
I was born. Other times she'd black out and threatened
to hurt herself. I had to call the cops a
few times to make sure she didn't. I found out
much later that she had been taking a prescription drug,
an upper. And what I didn't know until I was
nineteen was that the particular drug that she took, when
(04:29):
mixed with alcohol, produces textbook psychotic behavior. And man, when
it says as a side effect, this produces psychotic behavior,
you know it's bad. So that was my childhood, was
psychotic behavior. And I never knew which version of her
was going to come home or pick me up from
(04:49):
school or drop me off at a play. So I
grew up in a environment where I was entirely at
the mercy of somebody else's moods. Who was simultaneously my
greatest protector and my greatest antagonist. How did you learn
(05:14):
about Billy? I don't remember a time in my life
when I didn't know about Billy. Billy was the person
who my mom sang to at night. Billy was the
person who my mom talked to when she was cooking,
(05:37):
and she would talk about him in this mythological way
where he was just the best thing that ever happened
to her, and she didn't entertain any bullshit notions of
him being a prince. She's really into the fact that
he was raw. And my mom never told me anything
about her childhood, never told me anything about my grandparents,
(05:58):
never told me anything about my dad, never told me
anything about anything historical. So I grew up knowing that
she was a forward facing person. She looked towards the
future only, and later I realized her survival depended on it.
But the one exception to that rule was always Billy,
(06:19):
and it felt like that was because he still lived
with her, like he hadn't died, his body had moved on.
But I remember as a little kid thinking, has she
transferred her love for him to me? Does she think
that I am him reincarnated? And when I started to
(06:43):
process the timing of it that there was solid, like
two and a half year window between his death and
my birth, I was like, oh my God, Like what
if she thinks that I'm Billy reincarnate? The timing is eerie.
The timing is very eerie because there's some spirit floating around.
(07:08):
It just needs a little human body to crawl into.
Did I do? And I know who that spirit is?
That would be fucking crazy. So who was this person
(07:35):
who might be a part of me from Crimetown? I'm
io till it right? And this is the ballad of
Billy Balls? He said, can you come down to identify
(08:02):
the body? A William Heisman? And I just of course
went into this white and I would like to not
remember that feeling cuisine evening this stopped. It was you
(08:24):
being worn all right? Chapter three, Billy the Kid, Hi, Hi, Hi,
(08:46):
give me a hug, bloody Hi. To nail down some
basic facts about Billy, we went back to the only
source we had, my mom. What year was Billy born?
In nineteen He was born in Red Bank, Sandy Hook,
m What are the Sandy Hook? Rib Bank, New Jersey?
(09:08):
And his father was a Prohibition like rum runner with
a boat across from Jersey to New York. And he
lifted an engine off of some guy and he just
picked it up with his bare hands, an engine and
because such hernia that he died from hernia. His sweet mother,
(09:33):
this little tiny woman, she lived in Maine with his
half brother. And that's all I know. Not a lot
to go on. But I started digging through public records.
From what we know about his family, his parents are dead,
(09:54):
his dad died, his mom died in no ninet. If
he had an older brother, which we heard from both
my mom and the records, that he probably did have
an older brother, that older brother would have been that
(10:15):
kid was born in the twenties at least, so he
would have been at least twenty years older than Billy,
who would have been seventy four now. So that guy
would be nearing hundreds. So the likelihood of the brother
being alive is very slim. This thing on? Is this
(10:35):
about to be emotional Christmas? A few days later, Austin
pulled me into the studio history a little bit? Did
you find more about him? This is all? Oh my god.
So I'm holding right now like a stack of papers.
Oh my god. Alright. So the earliest thing that I
found that I think is Billy is this in the
(10:59):
Red Bank Register, which was the local newspaper. My mom
was fucking right, Red Bank, New Jersey, Red Bank, New Jersey.
Oh dude. Mr and Mrs John Heightsman of Wall Street
are parents of a son born Sunday at Monmouth Memorial
Hospital Billy was born on January to Norah Bell and
(11:22):
John Heightsman of Red Bank, New Jersey. But just two
years later, John Heightsman, forty Riverdale, av Monmouth Beach died
early this morning at the Monmouth Memorial Hospital. Surviving are
his parents and one son, William Heightsman Jr. Of Red Bank.
(11:42):
Doesn't say how he died, but that was seven, so
John Billy was very young. Billy's dad died when Billy
was only two years old. He never knew his father.
So and then I just found a bunch of very
(12:03):
cute things about Billy. So from Oakland Street School children
performed for p t A No. He was seven, singing
Boy's little Oh Billy Heightsman, Oh my God? What else?
See how I'm gonna barf? June nine fifty four, Ms.
(12:29):
Lillian Tahune presented her piano pupils Piano Pupils in a
concert Thursday night at the Women's Club There. It is
Billy Heightsman. Billy had taken piano lessons and one honors
in a state competition, and he was an artist in
other ways. To bicycle safety poster contest, Billy Heightsman first prize.
(12:53):
He won first prize in a bicycle safety poster contest.
So I've started to look up people all of these names.
Just let me see that again, people who might have
known him. Hello, this is rich Drimus in Red Bank. Oh,
(13:14):
thank you so much for calling me back. Are you
the right person? Yes, I guess I am. What's up.
Do you recognize the name William Heightsman, Yeah, you do.
Billy Heisman, Yes, she lived a better block away. Good.
Rich Drimas was friends with Billy in elementary school. Pretty smart? Um, friendly? Uh,
(13:38):
you're digging back in my computer here, pretty far. He
lived with his mother. I'm not sure whether his father
died during the war. He had a much older brother, Wow,
his brother. His older brother used to take a bunch
of us guys out into the woods and have us
Bill lean too. What was Red Bank like? My street
(14:02):
was pretty quiet, and the one I'm on right now
I still live in the same house. Um. You could
play ball in the streets in the evening, hide and
go seek, and it's pretty quiet. There was a place
called the y m c A where on fighting Saturday
nights they play recorded music you know from the fifties
(14:23):
rock and roll, and have dances. There were about three
or four of us that were friends that lived within
three or four blocks of each other. Um, do you
remember any other of the names of those friends? I'm
sure Owen Jones Clancy Poynton, Hello, Hello, I'm looking for
(14:50):
the Clancy Poynton who went to uh Oakland Street School
in Red Jersey. I'm the guy you're talking to. Do
you remember somebody named William Heightsman. You know you won't
believe this, but I just was about three days ago
reliving a memory of Billy Heightsmans. We just calling Billy.
(15:14):
It wasn't William Moise calling Billy, but this this year
he was an incredibly, uh unbelievable person. Clancy says that
even back in elementary school, Billy's behavior was extreme. Once
he came to Oakland Street School wrapped in a Nazi
(15:34):
flag that his brother had secured during the war. By
the way, Billy was Jewish, and it was a big one.
It was like a twelve foot Nazi flag and they
didn't quite know what to do with it was and
it was politically incorrect at that point. This is back
in the fifties, you know. And the teacher said, well,
(15:55):
I don't know, you know, and then somehow it just
kind of went away. And when Billy went to high school,
his penchant from making trouble got a little louder. I
remember in Red Back there was this place called Marine
Park where all these uh boats were, and I mean
(16:16):
there are people with a lot of money there, you know,
the nicest part of town. One day, me, my friend
Mike or are walking down there to Marine Park and
here comes Billy in a might have been a convertible
Jaguar like at two jag And you could tell that
(16:39):
it had been in the fire or something, okay, because
the entire thing was like burnout and and they had
the mufflers were taken off this thing because it was
so loud. You could hear Billy at the top of
the hill. So we're down at the bottom marine party,
and all of a sudden you hear Billy Heightsman coming mo.
(17:02):
These guys are playing shove aboard and they just like
I mean, they dive, they dive with the courts. It's
a explosion or bombs were coming in. Bill. He swings
around and he's got one of those scars that are
like a you know, the old airplane, you know, guys
back in the h World War One used to wear
you have the white scarfield flight out. He just two
(17:24):
circles around Marne Park and he just drove it home
a little a little slamboyant. What I remember of him,
it was very independent. Very Uh. They wouldn't say there's
the kind of guy that never fit in, but I
just wanted to say they kind of guy preferred to
(17:45):
be alone. When did you lose touch with Billy? Can?
I ask? Oh? It must have been early in high school.
I don't even know whether he graduated, And say, I
graduated in sixty two from Red Bank. Hi, I did
he graduate? I saw some hot yearbook photos in there.
Did you fucking find Billy's yearbook? Yeah? See if you
(18:10):
can find him Bill Heitzman, Oh yeah, fucking of course. Wow.
Doesn't he look like he has an attitude? Yeah? It
looks like a little greaser. He's got like full fifties
teddy boy hair. So this is from his sophomore year
in high school. This is the yearbook from six. I
looked in the yearbook for Xe. Not in it. Two,
(18:34):
not in it. But I think I might know why.
The first thing that I actually found when I started
looking for his ship. It was an article FBI nabs
youth in Florida hold up. A fifteen year old Red
(18:57):
Bank youth was arrested on Cedar av You last night
by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in connection with a
hold up of a shoe store. William Height spin from
Maple av and Hans Uto Weinert, address unknown are charged
with the hold up, which netted sevent hundred dollars. Oh
my fucking god. Listen, when I was sixteen, I sold
(19:26):
aspirin as ecstasy. Like getting picked up by the FBI
when you're fifteen, that is very impressive. Also, who's Hans
Uto Weinert. I'm pretty sure he's dead, but I am
(19:46):
also pretty sure that I found his children. That's after
the break. Hello, yes, sir, I gotta call him here.
(20:15):
A little while ago. This is Rogers Want. Roderick's father,
Hans was listed as Billy's accomplice in that shoe store robbery. Yeah,
that is that is my father. Did your father ever
talk about an incident where he robbed a shoe store
in Florida? Sure? Ed mm hmmm. He basically, I mean
(20:37):
I was a kid when he told me about it.
He said that, uh, I think the owner of the
shoe store and had a lot to do with it.
He was gonna tie him up and rob him and
make it look like a robbery. I'm a little confused.
So the owner of the shoe store was he had
my father tied him up to make it look like
(20:59):
a robbery. That's exactly what happened. I don't know if
that we're gonna split the money or what, you know,
I don't know. So then the FBI got involved and
they put pressure on the guy, and they told the
owner of the shoe store, and he told him would
really happened before my father got a restaurant. He didn't,
(21:20):
He didn't go to prison or anything. I'll tell you
that the FBI dropped the charges against both Billy and Hans.
I find that he pretty much got off on it.
He went onto the Tama chemist and everything. I got
a masters degree in chemistry. But Billy, he became a
master pissing off the cops. William Heights been seven Maple.
(21:43):
Alf Red Bank was charged with careless driving and having
noisy mufflers happen after an accident at Oceanic Bridge yesterday,
so he would have been about eighteen, he's driving around
around mufflers. So this one is from a month later.
Where my fucking christ, he got fined again. Yeah, he
(22:05):
got another ten dollar fine two or three weeks after that.
Oh my fucking comment. Around this time, William Heightsman disappeared
from the records. Years later, he re emerged in New
(22:25):
York City at the Pepmde Lounge in Midtown. Billy was
there and he was looking for a band to play
with him. This is Gregor Laroc, a musician who met
Billy when he first arrived in New York. What year
was that? Do you think I would say? What was
(22:47):
Billy like back then? Um? First of all, his image,
the way that he dressed with a tuxedo, well tux pants,
and then these gigantic boots that looked like Mickey Mouse,
kind of like bulbous in the front. And then he
sprayed into them pink and he called himself Romeo Love.
(23:11):
I mean, it wasn't it wasn't Billy Boss, hey man,
Romeo Love. And then he do this weird thing. You know,
you go shake his hand and he do that thing
with the middle finger in your palm and you go, oh,
and he give you that look like, hey, man, like
what you know? It's like that? And he had a
(23:34):
hearse that was a black at the believe it was
black with his huge red hearts on it. It's like
a cartoon. He could be funny and entertaining and all that,
(23:55):
but you're not gonna go and mess with a guy.
You know. He just knew just by looking at him
and talking and you know what I mean, you're not
gonna mess with him. Our relationship was just it was
really really into playing music. We hooked up and we
(24:15):
started doing gigs. At one time Jerry, this was at
a loft where we rehearsed. Gregor was rehearsing with Billy
and Jerry Nolan, who would go on to be a
drummer for the New York Dolls. Yes, Jerry Knowlan to
go and get something for him in his suitcase. Jerry
(24:36):
six is hand and he goes, men, you're not gonna
believe it. Stuck my hand there? What I see going?
He was, I pulled down. That's a gun. It's still
he's gun. Yeah. Why do you think Billy would have
a gun? Gregor? Because of all the different things that
(24:57):
he would get in who I guess do you remember
anything around when you found out that Billy was killed. Um,
I just thought it was like a big shock, you know,
that that he died. What was the impression of what
(25:24):
had happened? That it was a truck deal gone bad,
and that he pulled out a gun and he got shot.
That's what I heard. Was there any impression of who
had shot him? Uh, you mean the person's name, No, sure,
the person's name, or a sense of like if that
(25:46):
person was a dealer or undercover cop. But I don't know.
This matched up with what my mom told us in
chapter two, So I went back to her to dig
a bit deeper. How did really make money? How do
(26:17):
really make money? Well? In many different ways, like like
shows fronting and offering merchandise at various kinds. What kind
of merchandise, cars, musical instruments, amplifiers, etcetera, toll and ship,
(26:43):
do you find it, you sell it? You people bring
you shit, you sell it, etcetera. You know, did you
ever sell anything else? Like what like drugs? Are we
turning the microphone off? I was asked to get dope
(27:18):
for a very wealthy politician, and that's how I got
Billy to score for me. That's next time. On the
Ballad of Billy Balls, Crime Town is Zack Stewart Antier
(27:41):
and Mark Smirling. The Ballad of Billy Balls is hosted
by me Io till It Right and made in partnership
with Caden's Thirteen. You can find me on the internet.
I'm Io loves you on everything, and if you want
to know more about my story, you can pick up
my memoir Darling Days. We want to hear from you.
(28:03):
We have a voicemail set up for you to call us.
Here's a lovely message from last week. You just said
that she was your mom, and I'm in my car
and I just said what I just stopped? This is crazy.
I hope you find it. Pone you're looking for your
mom is amazing. I wish I could meet her. My
name is Michel, I'm in Ohio and I'm gonna take
(28:24):
care of I'm sure a lot of you have mysteries
in your own families or things this podcasts make you
think about. We want to know what they are. Call
us and leave us a voicemail at five seven oh three,
nine to six oh. We'll play another next week. A
(28:45):
lot of you have been asking for photos of Billy
and Rebecca. You can find them on our website, The
Ballad of Billy Balls dot Com, and you'll find a
discussion board too. The show is produced by Me, Kevin
Sheppard and Ryan Swigert. Our senior producers Austin Mitchell, editing
(29:07):
by Zack Stewart Pontier and Mark Smerling, fact checking by
Jennifer Blackman. This episode was mixed and sound designed by
Sam Bear. Music by Kenny qc Yak. Our title track
is Dark Allies by Light Asylum. Archival research by Brennan Reese.
(29:34):
Thanks to Daniella Aria, Rachel Lee Wright, Emily Wiedemann, Green
Card Pictures, Alessandro Sentauro, Bill Clegg, Ben Davis, Orne Rosenbaum,
and the team at Cadence thirteen, and of course, Rebecca,
without whom none of this would be possible. Ms SM
I grew up in the East Village in Manhattan in nine.
I was born in nine and I came of age
really in the early nineties in an era of crack
and the city was dead broke. I grew up with
(00:23):
a mom who was a single, very outside the system human,
so we never had any money, and my whole block
was low income housing. I was born opposite a seven
person men's shelter. On the corner was a group home
for boys, which was like a stepping stone to their
(00:45):
future life. Across the street on the next block was
the Hell's Angels headquarters. So you have this confluence of
wildness and poverty and crime, and the police called our
block the asshole of the universe because it was just
the meeting point, that conjunction of every shitty, crazy, insane
(01:09):
thing that could happen. But the East Village, you know,
we were two blocks from CBGBs, which is the birthplace
of punk music. Jean Michel Basquez Studio was on the
next block, and Nan Golden, who's my godmother, was around
the block. So they all came there to make weird
avant garde movies and make No Way of music and
(01:29):
make punk and make strange paintings and do cocaine and
sell whatever weird ship they wanted to sell and reinvent
their identities. And I was just trying to figure out
how to have a play date. They chose to be there,
and I was born there. When I was a little kid,
(01:53):
it was just me and my mom. We were a team,
and I could find her, I could reach for her,
I could say something, she would hear me. We lived
in a house full of hand me downs, all my
closer hand me downs. We would we got a mattress
from her friend. Everything was self invented and created. But
we would play together. We'd go up on the roof
(02:15):
together and and make up imaginary stories and games. And
if I had an idea for something, I wanted to
start a newspaper. She'd started with me, you know, like
she was chief of a tribe of two. And I
loved her for it, and I respected her for it,
and I trusted her judgment. And then something happened where
(02:35):
she changed, And I remember the first night I saw
her change from alcohol, and she put her fist through
a window and started screaming, and there was just a
blackness that came into her eyes, and I couldn't find
her anymore, and she was my only connectivity to the
outside world. So I lived a life with a person
(02:59):
who never sat down. Her thing is I don't sit
down to this day, only rides a bike everywhere, does
not will not sit down. So we walked, and we'd
walk from Third Street straight and I'm seven, eight nine
years old, walking, you know, from fifty seven street to
street to rehearsal at eight pm, and then rehearsing some
(03:21):
terrible off Broadway garbage production of Oliver Twist or Charlotte's Web,
and then walking home at midnight, and like not knowing
whether or not the lights are going to be on
when we get there because funk the man. She doesn't
pay electric bills. And we have a cable running out
the window to the neighbor to keep like one lamp on,
but forget the fridge. I didn't learn how to use
(03:43):
silver ware till I was thirteen years old. Like I
was raised a wolf child, and I wasn't allowed to
close any doors. I wouldn't allowed to have keys to
my own house. I was seventeen, things got pretty dark.
Sometimes would just lay in the bathtub and whale crying
out for Billy, the love she lost three years before
(04:06):
I was born. Other times she'd black out and threatened
to hurt herself. I had to call the cops a
few times to make sure she didn't. I found out
much later that she had been taking a prescription drug,
an upper. And what I didn't know until I was
nineteen was that the particular drug that she took, when
(04:29):
mixed with alcohol, produces textbook psychotic behavior. And man, when
it says as a side effect, this produces psychotic behavior,
you know it's bad. So that was my childhood, was
psychotic behavior. And I never knew which version of her
was going to come home or pick me up from
(04:49):
school or drop me off at a play. So I
grew up in a environment where I was entirely at
the mercy of somebody else's moods. Who was simultaneously my
greatest protector and my greatest antagonist. How did you learn
(05:14):
about Billy? I don't remember a time in my life
when I didn't know about Billy. Billy was the person
who my mom sang to at night. Billy was the
person who my mom talked to when she was cooking,
(05:37):
and she would talk about him in this mythological way
where he was just the best thing that ever happened
to her, and she didn't entertain any bullshit notions of
him being a prince. She's really into the fact that
he was raw. And my mom never told me anything
about her childhood, never told me anything about my grandparents,
(05:58):
never told me anything about my dad, never told me
anything about anything historical. So I grew up knowing that
she was a forward facing person. She looked towards the
future only, and later I realized her survival depended on it.
But the one exception to that rule was always Billy,
(06:19):
and it felt like that was because he still lived
with her, like he hadn't died, his body had moved on.
But I remember as a little kid thinking, has she
transferred her love for him to me? Does she think
that I am him reincarnated? And when I started to
(06:43):
process the timing of it that there was solid, like
two and a half year window between his death and
my birth, I was like, oh my God, Like what
if she thinks that I'm Billy reincarnate? The timing is eerie.
The timing is very eerie because there's some spirit floating around.
(07:08):
It just needs a little human body to crawl into.
Did I do? And I know who that spirit is?
That would be fucking crazy. So who was this person
(07:35):
who might be a part of me from Crimetown? I'm
io till it right? And this is the ballad of
Billy Balls? He said, can you come down to identify
(08:02):
the body? A William Heisman? And I just of course
went into this white and I would like to not
remember that feeling cuisine evening this stopped. It was you
(08:24):
being worn all right? Chapter three, Billy the Kid, Hi, Hi, Hi,
(08:46):
give me a hug, bloody Hi. To nail down some
basic facts about Billy, we went back to the only
source we had, my mom. What year was Billy born?
In nineteen He was born in Red Bank, Sandy Hook,
m What are the Sandy Hook? Rib Bank, New Jersey?
(09:08):
And his father was a Prohibition like rum runner with
a boat across from Jersey to New York. And he
lifted an engine off of some guy and he just
picked it up with his bare hands, an engine and
because such hernia that he died from hernia. His sweet mother,
(09:33):
this little tiny woman, she lived in Maine with his
half brother. And that's all I know. Not a lot
to go on. But I started digging through public records.
From what we know about his family, his parents are dead,
(09:54):
his dad died, his mom died in no ninet. If
he had an older brother, which we heard from both
my mom and the records, that he probably did have
an older brother, that older brother would have been that
(10:15):
kid was born in the twenties at least, so he
would have been at least twenty years older than Billy,
who would have been seventy four now. So that guy
would be nearing hundreds. So the likelihood of the brother
being alive is very slim. This thing on? Is this
(10:35):
about to be emotional Christmas? A few days later, Austin
pulled me into the studio history a little bit? Did
you find more about him? This is all? Oh my god.
So I'm holding right now like a stack of papers.
Oh my god. Alright. So the earliest thing that I
found that I think is Billy is this in the
(10:59):
Red Bank Register, which was the local newspaper. My mom
was fucking right, Red Bank, New Jersey, Red Bank, New Jersey.
Oh dude. Mr and Mrs John Heightsman of Wall Street
are parents of a son born Sunday at Monmouth Memorial
Hospital Billy was born on January to Norah Bell and
(11:22):
John Heightsman of Red Bank, New Jersey. But just two
years later, John Heightsman, forty Riverdale, av Monmouth Beach died
early this morning at the Monmouth Memorial Hospital. Surviving are
his parents and one son, William Heightsman Jr. Of Red Bank.
(11:42):
Doesn't say how he died, but that was seven, so
John Billy was very young. Billy's dad died when Billy
was only two years old. He never knew his father.
So and then I just found a bunch of very
(12:03):
cute things about Billy. So from Oakland Street School children
performed for p t A No. He was seven, singing
Boy's little Oh Billy Heightsman, Oh my God? What else?
See how I'm gonna barf? June nine fifty four, Ms.
(12:29):
Lillian Tahune presented her piano pupils Piano Pupils in a
concert Thursday night at the Women's Club There. It is
Billy Heightsman. Billy had taken piano lessons and one honors
in a state competition, and he was an artist in
other ways. To bicycle safety poster contest, Billy Heightsman first prize.
(12:53):
He won first prize in a bicycle safety poster contest.
So I've started to look up people all of these names.
Just let me see that again, people who might have
known him. Hello, this is rich Drimus in Red Bank. Oh,
(13:14):
thank you so much for calling me back. Are you
the right person? Yes, I guess I am. What's up.
Do you recognize the name William Heightsman, Yeah, you do.
Billy Heisman, Yes, she lived a better block away. Good.
Rich Drimas was friends with Billy in elementary school. Pretty smart? Um, friendly? Uh,
(13:38):
you're digging back in my computer here, pretty far. He
lived with his mother. I'm not sure whether his father
died during the war. He had a much older brother, Wow,
his brother. His older brother used to take a bunch
of us guys out into the woods and have us
Bill lean too. What was Red Bank like? My street
(14:02):
was pretty quiet, and the one I'm on right now
I still live in the same house. Um. You could
play ball in the streets in the evening, hide and
go seek, and it's pretty quiet. There was a place
called the y m c A where on fighting Saturday
nights they play recorded music you know from the fifties
(14:23):
rock and roll, and have dances. There were about three
or four of us that were friends that lived within
three or four blocks of each other. Um, do you
remember any other of the names of those friends? I'm
sure Owen Jones Clancy Poynton, Hello, Hello, I'm looking for
(14:50):
the Clancy Poynton who went to uh Oakland Street School
in Red Jersey. I'm the guy you're talking to. Do
you remember somebody named William Heightsman. You know you won't
believe this, but I just was about three days ago
reliving a memory of Billy Heightsmans. We just calling Billy.
(15:14):
It wasn't William Moise calling Billy, but this this year
he was an incredibly, uh unbelievable person. Clancy says that
even back in elementary school, Billy's behavior was extreme. Once
he came to Oakland Street School wrapped in a Nazi
(15:34):
flag that his brother had secured during the war. By
the way, Billy was Jewish, and it was a big one.
It was like a twelve foot Nazi flag and they
didn't quite know what to do with it was and
it was politically incorrect at that point. This is back
in the fifties, you know. And the teacher said, well,
(15:55):
I don't know, you know, and then somehow it just
kind of went away. And when Billy went to high school,
his penchant from making trouble got a little louder. I
remember in Red Back there was this place called Marine
Park where all these uh boats were, and I mean
(16:16):
there are people with a lot of money there, you know,
the nicest part of town. One day, me, my friend
Mike or are walking down there to Marine Park and
here comes Billy in a might have been a convertible
Jaguar like at two jag And you could tell that
(16:39):
it had been in the fire or something, okay, because
the entire thing was like burnout and and they had
the mufflers were taken off this thing because it was
so loud. You could hear Billy at the top of
the hill. So we're down at the bottom marine party,
and all of a sudden you hear Billy Heightsman coming mo.
(17:02):
These guys are playing shove aboard and they just like
I mean, they dive, they dive with the courts. It's
a explosion or bombs were coming in. Bill. He swings
around and he's got one of those scars that are
like a you know, the old airplane, you know, guys
back in the h World War One used to wear
you have the white scarfield flight out. He just two
(17:24):
circles around Marne Park and he just drove it home
a little a little slamboyant. What I remember of him,
it was very independent. Very Uh. They wouldn't say there's
the kind of guy that never fit in, but I
just wanted to say they kind of guy preferred to
(17:45):
be alone. When did you lose touch with Billy? Can?
I ask? Oh? It must have been early in high school.
I don't even know whether he graduated, And say, I
graduated in sixty two from Red Bank. Hi, I did
he graduate? I saw some hot yearbook photos in there.
Did you fucking find Billy's yearbook? Yeah? See if you
(18:10):
can find him Bill Heitzman, Oh yeah, fucking of course. Wow.
Doesn't he look like he has an attitude? Yeah? It
looks like a little greaser. He's got like full fifties
teddy boy hair. So this is from his sophomore year
in high school. This is the yearbook from six. I
looked in the yearbook for Xe. Not in it. Two,
(18:34):
not in it. But I think I might know why.
The first thing that I actually found when I started
looking for his ship. It was an article FBI nabs
youth in Florida hold up. A fifteen year old Red
(18:57):
Bank youth was arrested on Cedar av You last night
by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in connection with a
hold up of a shoe store. William Height spin from
Maple av and Hans Uto Weinert, address unknown are charged
with the hold up, which netted sevent hundred dollars. Oh
my fucking god. Listen, when I was sixteen, I sold
(19:26):
aspirin as ecstasy. Like getting picked up by the FBI
when you're fifteen, that is very impressive. Also, who's Hans
Uto Weinert. I'm pretty sure he's dead, but I am
(19:46):
also pretty sure that I found his children. That's after
the break. Hello, yes, sir, I gotta call him here.
(20:15):
A little while ago. This is Rogers Want. Roderick's father,
Hans was listed as Billy's accomplice in that shoe store robbery. Yeah,
that is that is my father. Did your father ever
talk about an incident where he robbed a shoe store
in Florida? Sure? Ed mm hmmm. He basically, I mean
(20:37):
I was a kid when he told me about it.
He said that, uh, I think the owner of the
shoe store and had a lot to do with it.
He was gonna tie him up and rob him and
make it look like a robbery. I'm a little confused.
So the owner of the shoe store was he had
my father tied him up to make it look like
(20:59):
a robbery. That's exactly what happened. I don't know if
that we're gonna split the money or what, you know,
I don't know. So then the FBI got involved and
they put pressure on the guy, and they told the
owner of the shoe store, and he told him would
really happened before my father got a restaurant. He didn't,
(21:20):
He didn't go to prison or anything. I'll tell you
that the FBI dropped the charges against both Billy and Hans.
I find that he pretty much got off on it.
He went onto the Tama chemist and everything. I got
a masters degree in chemistry. But Billy, he became a
master pissing off the cops. William Heights been seven Maple.
(21:43):
Alf Red Bank was charged with careless driving and having
noisy mufflers happen after an accident at Oceanic Bridge yesterday,
so he would have been about eighteen, he's driving around
around mufflers. So this one is from a month later.
Where my fucking christ, he got fined again. Yeah, he
(22:05):
got another ten dollar fine two or three weeks after that.
Oh my fucking comment. Around this time, William Heightsman disappeared
from the records. Years later, he re emerged in New
(22:25):
York City at the Pepmde Lounge in Midtown. Billy was
there and he was looking for a band to play
with him. This is Gregor Laroc, a musician who met
Billy when he first arrived in New York. What year
was that? Do you think I would say? What was
(22:47):
Billy like back then? Um? First of all, his image,
the way that he dressed with a tuxedo, well tux pants,
and then these gigantic boots that looked like Mickey Mouse,
kind of like bulbous in the front. And then he
sprayed into them pink and he called himself Romeo Love.
(23:11):
I mean, it wasn't it wasn't Billy Boss, hey man,
Romeo Love. And then he do this weird thing. You know,
you go shake his hand and he do that thing
with the middle finger in your palm and you go, oh,
and he give you that look like, hey, man, like
what you know? It's like that? And he had a
(23:34):
hearse that was a black at the believe it was
black with his huge red hearts on it. It's like
a cartoon. He could be funny and entertaining and all that,
(23:55):
but you're not gonna go and mess with a guy.
You know. He just knew just by looking at him
and talking and you know what I mean, you're not
gonna mess with him. Our relationship was just it was
really really into playing music. We hooked up and we
(24:15):
started doing gigs. At one time Jerry, this was at
a loft where we rehearsed. Gregor was rehearsing with Billy
and Jerry Nolan, who would go on to be a
drummer for the New York Dolls. Yes, Jerry Knowlan to
go and get something for him in his suitcase. Jerry
(24:36):
six is hand and he goes, men, you're not gonna
believe it. Stuck my hand there? What I see going?
He was, I pulled down. That's a gun. It's still
he's gun. Yeah. Why do you think Billy would have
a gun? Gregor? Because of all the different things that
(24:57):
he would get in who I guess do you remember
anything around when you found out that Billy was killed. Um,
I just thought it was like a big shock, you know,
that that he died. What was the impression of what
(25:24):
had happened? That it was a truck deal gone bad,
and that he pulled out a gun and he got shot.
That's what I heard. Was there any impression of who
had shot him? Uh, you mean the person's name, No, sure,
the person's name, or a sense of like if that
(25:46):
person was a dealer or undercover cop. But I don't know.
This matched up with what my mom told us in
chapter two, So I went back to her to dig
a bit deeper. How did really make money? How do
(26:17):
really make money? Well? In many different ways, like like
shows fronting and offering merchandise at various kinds. What kind
of merchandise, cars, musical instruments, amplifiers, etcetera, toll and ship,
(26:43):
do you find it, you sell it? You people bring
you shit, you sell it, etcetera. You know, did you
ever sell anything else? Like what like drugs? Are we
turning the microphone off? I was asked to get dope
(27:18):
for a very wealthy politician, and that's how I got
Billy to score for me. That's next time. On the
Ballad of Billy Balls, Crime Town is Zack Stewart Antier
(27:41):
and Mark Smirling. The Ballad of Billy Balls is hosted
by me Io till It Right and made in partnership
with Caden's Thirteen. You can find me on the internet.
I'm Io loves you on everything, and if you want
to know more about my story, you can pick up
my memoir Darling Days. We want to hear from you.
(28:03):
We have a voicemail set up for you to call us.
Here's a lovely message from last week. You just said
that she was your mom, and I'm in my car
and I just said what I just stopped? This is crazy.
I hope you find it. Pone you're looking for your
mom is amazing. I wish I could meet her. My
name is Michel, I'm in Ohio and I'm gonna take
(28:24):
care of I'm sure a lot of you have mysteries
in your own families or things this podcasts make you
think about. We want to know what they are. Call
us and leave us a voicemail at five seven oh three,
nine to six oh. We'll play another next week. A
(28:45):
lot of you have been asking for photos of Billy
and Rebecca. You can find them on our website, The
Ballad of Billy Balls dot Com, and you'll find a
discussion board too. The show is produced by Me, Kevin
Sheppard and Ryan Swigert. Our senior producers Austin Mitchell, editing
(29:07):
by Zack Stewart Pontier and Mark Smerling, fact checking by
Jennifer Blackman. This episode was mixed and sound designed by
Sam Bear. Music by Kenny qc Yak. Our title track
is Dark Allies by Light Asylum. Archival research by Brennan Reese.
(29:34):
Thanks to Daniella Aria, Rachel Lee Wright, Emily Wiedemann, Green
Card Pictures, Alessandro Sentauro, Bill Clegg, Ben Davis, Orne Rosenbaum,
and the team at Cadence thirteen, and of course, Rebecca,
without whom none of this would be possible. Ms SM
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