The voice on the 911 line was strained, with an edge of panic.
“I’ve been shot,” the man said. There were no sounds in the background that offered any clues to what had taken place. Just the low, steady static of the recorded line.
“Where is this, sir?” asked the dispatcher, who scribbled on a notepad as the wheels of a reel-to-reel recorder captured each dramatic breath and pause.
“I — I have no idea,” the man stammered.
It was 8:43 p.m. on the night of Oct. 23, 1989. The man’s name was Charles Stuart, but everybody called him Chuck. He was lost somewhere in Boston, calling from the brick of a car phone installed in his blue Toyota Cressida. He wasn’t alone.
His wife, Carol, sat in the passenger seat next to him. She was seven months pregnant with their first child. And Chuck said Carol was in bad shape.
The dispatcher looked up from his notes and signaled to a sergeant — two fingers, two victims.
The sergeant grabbed another phone to listen in. He pulled the spiral phone cord tight, and wedged the handset between his ear and shoulder.
“I was just coming from … Brigham and Women’s Hospital,” said Chuck, stumbling over the words.
His voice carried just a hint of a Boston accent, like something he’d tried to leave behind. He sounded white, educated, and polite. He and Carol had been heading home to the North Shore from a birthing class. Chuck said a man jumped into his car and told him to drive.
“He made us go to an abandoned area.” Chuck said. He was talking in scattered sentence fragments now. He panted and moaned.
The dispatcher pushed him to describe his location — anything, a cross street, a building — but Chuck was fading.
“I don’t know. I don’t see any signs,” Chuck said. “Oh, god.”
But the dispatcher was starting to piece it together.