Murder in Boston (2 page)

Unhappily, though, Brigham and Women’s was not located in one of the city’s stellar neighborhoods, situated as it was on the fringe of Roxbury. A once fashionable section populated by the city’s elite, Roxbury had, over the years, gradually eroded. Historian Theodore White, in his autobiographical tome
In Search of History
, recalls Roxbury when he was growing up nearby in the 1920s as a declining neighborhood that shortly before had been home to the city’s prosperous shoe factories. But the factories closed during the Great Depression, and the neighborhood went farther downhill. As is common in large cities, the older inner neighborhoods were abandoned by their original inhabitants, who fled to the suburbs. Their old dwellings were taken over by poorer residents, the newer immigrants. In Roxbury, particularly Mission Hill, this meant first the Irish, then blacks and Orientals. In the spring of 1968, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, blacks across the country rioted in their ghettos. In Boston the ghetto was Roxbury. Since then an uneasy peace, more like a truce, had settled over the area, but the currents of racial tension flowed strongly just below the surface. There was a lot of black/white antagonism in Boston, and much of it was rooted in Roxbury.

Although Roxbury proper is a little southeast of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the distance is not great. One thing many outsiders fail to realize about Boston is how small, how compact, the city actually is. Boston itself covers only 45.5 square miles, and its population is slightly under 500,000. Of this total, some 85,000 people, roughly 17 percent of the total, are black. The millions of people most think of as Bostonians are actually residents of the small communities that surround the city, bedroom communities like Lexington, Woburn, Quincy, Framingham, Groton, Revere, Medford, and Reading. Carol, in fact, grew up in Medford; Chuck in Revere. They currently lived in Reading, in a luxurious $239,000 home complete with a heated swimming pool in the backyard. But, like many others, they made their living in Boston and depended on the city for its facilities, like health care.

The neighborhood around Brigham and Women’s can best be described as “mixed,” mixed racially, culturally, and by class. On one side is Roxbury, another Mission Hill, and throughout are peppered some of the city’s most distinguished institutions. Within a comfortable walk from where Carol and Chuck were getting into their Toyota was Northeastern University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Latin High School (whose alumni include Theodore White), Beth Israel Hospital, Peter Brent Brigham Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, all of which have outstanding reputations in their respected fields. But despite the proximity of these celebrated institutions, the neighborhood was still regarded as an extremely dangerous one. It was, in fact, one of the city’s premier high-crime spots. To the Boston police department, it is part of Area B, a 1.5-square-mile chunk that includes Roxbury, Mattapan, and part of Dorchester. From a criminologist’s point of view, there is little comforting, intellectual, or healthful about Area B. In a forty-day period ending the previous week, there were 170 reported shootings in the district, an average of 4.25 per day. So far that year there had been seventy-seven murders in all of Boston, but more than half of them were in Area B, which is one of five districts the police use to subdivide the city. By the end of the year, one hundred murders were recorded in the city, fifty-five of them in Area B.

Neither Chuck nor Carol was ignorant of these statistics. Before he left work that afternoon to meet Carol, Chuck and a co-worker, Peter Jaworski, had talked about the dangerous neighborhood in which Brigham and Women’s was located. As Chuck walked out the door onto Newbury Street, which was jammed as usual with upscale shoppers, Jaworski gave him a piece of advice: “Be careful,” he said.

While Carol had some difficulty slipping into the Toyota because of her pregnancy, her husband had problems for a different reason. A husky, avid sportsman who kept fit with basketball and weight lifting when he could steal the time from his job and his wife, Chuck was not suited physically to the conflicting dimensions of a Japanese import; his legs were too long and his shoulders too broad for him to get comfortable. That may have been one reason he didn’t own a car of his own. The Toyota was Carol’s car
and
the family car. If he needed transportation, he usually borrowed his employer’s van, which was considerably more commodious. But this was a personal errand, and he elected to drive the Toyota rather than take the Kakas vehicle. Scrunching behind the wheel, he fastened his seat belt and started the engine.

If the two made small talk, they may have commented on the beautiful weather they were enjoying. Although autumn is almost always a glorious season in Massachusetts, 1989 was particularly nice. Traditionally autumn is when the New England foliage takes on magnificent hues of gold and scarlet, and there is enough nip in the air to set the blood coursing wildly through summer-numbed veins. Bodies that have been lethargic through July, August, and part of September are miraculously rejuvenated when the nights turn chilly and the chlorophyll disappears from the oaks and elms. A New England autumn is one of the wonders of the American world, and each year thousands come from all points on the compass to revel in the splendor. This year the fall had been a particularly splendid one. In mid-October Indian summer made a welcome visit and surprised and delighted everyone by settling in for a prolonged stay. The sky turned a remarkable blue; the Charles River glowed with a penetrating incandescence. The sun shined brightly; the grass held its brilliant summer green, and the trees glowed as radiantly as if they had been touched by a modern Midas. It was a wonderful time to be alive. For Carol, that would be the final irony.

Maneuvering out of the hospital, Chuck came out on Francis Street, a narrow thoroughfare running northwest-southeast between Huntington and Brookline Avenues. Chuck’s expected action would have been to turn right, toward Reading. Instead he turned left, toward Huntington, into the heart of Mission Hill. Carol, perhaps preoccupied with what she had learned in that evening’s Lamaze class or reveling in the mild night, may not have noticed. Even if she had, it would not have made much difference. The decision was made. In roughly twenty minutes, about the time it takes to drink a sociable cup of coffee, Carol would be effectively dead.

Chapter 2

October 23, 1989

8:36
P
.
M
.

In the late 1980s, when car telephones began proliferating at a near astronomical rate, Massachusetts law enforcement officials set up a special computer network to handle emergency calls from motorists. Although there are two other ways of dialing the Massachusetts State Police from cellular telephones—either through 1-800-525-5555 or, much more simply, *77—the emergency dialing number of choice across the country is 911. Planners figured that when dialing for help, motorists would not differentiate between a cellular phone and a regular phone, so they factored the 911 code into the system. In Boston, a regular phone user dialing 911 is connected to the Boston Police Department Communications Center area, also known as “the turret.” But a motorist dialing 911 from his car is switched via computer to the Massachusetts State Police Communications Center, called “the bunker,” which is housed in a twenty-foot-by-thirty-foot cavelike room buried in a drab, featureless building at 1010 Commonwealth Avenue, not far from Boston University.

Depending on the day (the weekends are far busier), the bunker is manned by one to three civilian dispatchers and a state trooper who acts as shift commander. The calls are handled by the civilians. The trooper is there in case law enforcement authority is necessary, since the state police have responsibility for investigating all felony crimes anywhere in Massachusetts except in Boston proper, where they are handled by the city police. In any given month the dispatchers field 250 to 300 calls a day; the heaviest periods are weekend nights. Monday nights are generally fairly slow. Experience has shown that dispatchers working the evening trick on a Monday will receive about seventy-five calls between three and eleven
P
.
M
., which is enough of a workload to keep two people busy, but not enough to justify having a third person on duty. On Monday, October 23, dispatchers Gary McLaughlin and Jack Moran were manning the desk, which runs down the center of the room and is flanked by stacks of metal boxes jammed with electronic gear. The trooper acting as shift commander, seated at a desk in a small alcove at the rear of the room, was Sergeant Daniel Grabowski. Among them, the men have some sixty years’ experience in law enforcement work.

McLaughlin, a shy, graying thirty-five-year-old who signed on with the state police at the end of his freshman year at Boston State College, was taking a quick breather after a particularly harrowing call involving an attempted murder on the western edge of their territory. His pulse was just returning to normal when the phone at his elbow shrilled insistently.

“State police, Boston,” McLaughlin answered, hoping to hear an angry motorist complaining about a reckless driver or a Good Samaritan reporting a fender bender. What he got was another crisis. Over the line came the unmistakable sound of tortured breathing: a wheeze, a grunt, a disembodied sound sending an immediate chill down McLaughlin’s spine. Then a male voice sobbed, “My wife’s been shot. I’ve been shot.”

McLaughlin’s pulse rate soared. “Where is this, sir?” he asked briskly.

“I have no idea,” the voice replied, heavy with pain.

“Try to give me an indication of where you might be,” McLaughlin pressed, “a cross street, anything.”

There was a long silence. “Hello?” the voice said, sounding fainter.

“Yes, go ahead,” McLaughlin replied, exchanging a significant glance with Moran, who was seated at the main communications console some three feet away. Without a word, both Moran and Grabowski reached for their phones and plugged into McLaughlin’s line. The call, like all others that come in through the network, was being recorded, but McLaughlin, Grabowski, and Moran acted as a tight-knit team. When there was an emergency they all pitched in to help. As McLaughlin hunched over the desk, the voice of the caller fed through three receivers.

“He got into the car at Huntington Avenue,” the voice said. “I drove straight through Huntington Avenue.”

“Where are you right now, sir?” McLaughlin urged. “Can you indicate to me?”

“No,” the voice said, beginning to sound panicky. “I don’t know. He drove us…he made us go to an abandoned area.”

One of the disadvantages of having all 911 calls from cellular phones switched automatically to the bunker was that dispatchers have no idea where the call may be coming from until they are told by the caller. They could be anywhere in Greater Boston, anywhere within reach of the giant state police antenna. But as soon as the caller said Huntington Avenue, McLaughlin knew he was in Boston proper. So did Grabowski, who was already grabbing another phone and dialing through to Boston PD on a separate line. He wanted to get the city police active as soon as possible. Independent of the trooper’s action, Moran swung into action on the city police’s emergency radio channel.

“Okay,” McLaughlin said as soothingly as he could. “Can you see out the windows? Can you tell me where you are?”

There was a pause. “No, I don’t know,” the man replied. “I don’t see any signs.” He groaned, “Oh, God.”

“What kind of car do you have?” McLaughlin asked.

“Toyota Cressida,” the man replied immediately.

“You’re in the city of Boston, though?” McLaughlin asked, determined to confirm his suspicions.

“Yes,” the voice said.

“Can you give me any indications where you might be, any buildings?”

The man groaned heavily. “No,” he croaked.

“Okay,” McLaughlin said calmly, deciding to take another tack. The important thing, he felt, was to keep the communication going, keep the line open. “Has your wife been shot as well?”

“Yes,” the voice replied. “In the head.”

McLaughlin grimaced. “Okay,” he said, trying to keep emotion out of his voice. “Bear with me now. Stand by. Stay on the phone with me.”

“Should I try to drive?”

“No,” McLaughlin answered quickly. “The people that shot you, are they in the area right there?”

“No,” the voice replied. “They took off. They left.”

“Okay,” McLaughlin directed. “Can you look out? Can you get out of the vehicle and look around to see where you are, sir? I’m trying to get some assistance to you.”

Boston PD, tipped by the street name, was already rushing cars to the area. They got another clue when the caller said he and his wife had just left Brigham and Women’s Hospital, when the attack occurred. Since he said he had not gone far, that meant he probably was in Roxbury. It was not a great area in which to lie wounded and helpless.

“Should I drive up to the corner of the street?” the man asked, a touch of panic seeming to creep into his voice.

McLaughlin considered that briefly. “If you can drive without hurting yourself, yes,” he replied. But he felt intuitively that it would be better if the police could find him before he moved. “Just try to give me a cross street,” McLaughlin repeated patiently. “If you can drive, give me any street indication, and stay there. I’ll get someone right to you.”