Writer’s prank snares famous

WASHINGTON -- Over the years, "Little Billy" learned much from America's top minds.

Secretaries of state, touched by the 10-year-old's handwritten letters , wrote back advising him how to settle a treehouse dispute with his sister. O.J. Simpson's lawyer told him how to get off the hook on accusations he destroyed a doll. A publisher of racy magazines, asked whether there was a version for kids, told him to read the Sears catalog, and "you'll be 18 before you know it."

Billy also wrote to notorious criminals asking whether he should stay in school. The Son of Sam serial killer told him not to waste his life, like he did. The Unabomber merely wished him luck.

It was all a big setup. Little Billy was actually grown-up Bill Geerhart, asking questions of the famous and infamous Their correspondence back -- humorous, head-scratching, poignant -- is compiled in a book, "Little Billy's Letters."

Geerhart collected the letters over 15 years, starting in the 1990s while he was an unemployed writer in Los Angeles.

Most of the letters go back to a time before e-mails took over written communication. But some are recent. In 2008, Sarah Palin's dad, Chuck Heath, handling mail for the Republican vice presidential candidate, declined to take Billy to hunt wolves by air. "No wolf hunting from heli­copters here," Heath scribbles.

For career advice, Billy, leaning toward convenience store clerk because he would have access to video games, polls those in other fields, including assisted-suicide figure Jack Kevorkian. From his prison cell, Kevorkian responds, "Sometimes I wish I was a 7-11 clerk!"

As Billy campaigns for third-grade class president, he gets good luck wishes from former President Gerald Ford and former Vice President Dan Quayle.

Less civic-mindedly, Billy writes Anheuser-Busch asking "if there is a beer for kids," just as he asked Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt about porn for the pint-sized. No dice.

Flynt writes that Billy could subscribe to Hustler when he turned 18: "Until then, you should read the Sears & Roebuck catalog." An Anheuser-Busch executive sends his parents a brochure on how to talk to kids about drinking.

Robert Shapiro, on the legal team that won O.J. Simpson's acquittal in the 1994 slayings of his ex-wife and a friend, was full of ideas when Billy asked how to defend himself against allegations that he, not his dog, destroyed his sister's doll.

"Is there any forensic evidence that will support your theory that the dog killed the doll?" Shapiro replied. "Were any scraps of doll clothing found near his dog house, perhaps? How about tooth marks on the doll's remains (assuming there were remains)? If so, a good forensic dentist should be able to match them to the dog."

David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam slayer who killed six women in a late-1970s rampage in New York City, tells Billy, "Don't do self-destructive things," and opens up about his own grief and guilt. Murderous cult leader Charles Manson merely beefs that he's not getting his Los Angeles Times in prison.

Seeking the wise counsel of retired diplomats for how to stop incursions by his sister "Connie" into his treehouse, Billy gets former secretaries of state James Baker and Henry Kissinger to bless a handwritten, one-year "treaty" that would keep Connie out. Baker thought it should last two years though.

Geerhart, a record producer in Los Angeles and curator of a Cold War pop culture Web site, once had Little Billy contemplating which religion to join, so he asked officials at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to verify that "you get to wear cool underwear and have extra wives." The inquiry earned a visit from two Mormon missionaries. Geerhart concocted an excuse for Billy's absence and snapped a picture of the tie-clad missionaries in his messy apartment.

He includes the photo in the book.