An hour after walking into a small Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania last week with a small arsenal of guns and hardware, Charles C. Roberts IV told a dispatcher in a calm, dispassionate voice just what his emergency was.
“I just took, uh, 10 girls hostage and I want everybody off the property or, or else,” Mr. Roberts told a 911 dispatcher for Lancaster County, according to a transcript of the conversation released yesterday.
As the dispatcher tries to engage him, Mr. Roberts threatens to kill the girls, but his voice “is not angry, there is no yelling and screaming,” the county district attorney, Don Totaro, said in an interview.
Mr. Totaro authorized the release of the transcript after formal requests from state and national news media under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law. He said he listened to the tapes to check the transcript’s accuracy.
Mr. Roberts’s voice is “flat,” Mr. Totaro said. “It’s almost like there’s no soul there.”
“It’s beyond comprehension, particularly when you listen to the tapes and realize he’s about to shoot 10 innocent Amish girls,” he said.
Mr. Roberts, 32, a married father of three children who collected milk from farms in the area and delivered it for processing, shot all 10 girls inside the West Nickel Mines Amish School. Five were killed and five others suffered serious wounds, including at least one who is not expected to recover, officials have said.
The dispatcher’s short conversation with Mr. Roberts, as well as calls from his wife, Marie, and the farmer who made the first 911 call, after a young teacher fled the schoolhouse to seek help, show how frantic Mr. Roberts’s brief siege was.
Mr. Roberts’s call came in at 10:55 a.m. on Oct. 2, and lasted just over a minute, with the dispatcher trying to figure out what was going on.
“O.K., what’s the problem there?” asks the dispatcher, who was not identified.
“Don’t try to talk me out of it, get ’em all off the property now,” Mr. Roberts replies, referring to the state police, who were already on the scene in response to a call some 20 minutes earlier from the farmer, Amos Smoker, who first alerted the police to the situation after the teacher, Emma Mae Zook, fled to his home.
“I’m going to let the state police down there, I need to let you talk to them, O.K. Can I transfer you to them?” the dispatcher says to Mr. Roberts.
Mr. Roberts replies: “No, you tell them, and that’s it. Right now or they’re dead, in two seconds.”
As the dispatcher tries to transfer the call, Mr. Roberts repeats, “Two seconds, that’s it,” before the line goes dead.
About two minutes later, Marie Roberts called 911 about a phone conversation she had just had with her husband.
“She’s obviously distraught and concerned,” Mr. Totaro said, characterizing the call. “But she’s composed.”
During the call, Mrs. Roberts says: “Yes, my name is Marie Roberts, my husband just called me on his cellphone and told me that he wasn’t going to be coming home and that the police were there and not to worry about it. And I have no idea what he is talking about, but I am really scared.”
Mrs. Roberts tells the dispatcher her husband told her that “he was upset about something that had happened 20 years ago and he said he was getting revenge for it. I don’t think he was getting revenge on another person. I’m worried that maybe he was trying to commit suicide.”
After her call is transferred to a state police dispatcher, Mrs. Roberts explains that her husband took her grandfather’s blue GMC pickup truck that morning and left behind notes expressing the thought of not seeing his children, “not seeing them grow up, like, let’s see, uh, I’m not even sure.”
“Here it is: ‘My daughter Abigail. I want you to know that I love you and I’m sorry I couldn’t be here to watch you grow up.’ That’s how the note starts,” Mrs. Roberts says.
A 1999 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision allows withholding 911 tapes from the news media, but “because of the unfettered media access in this case,” Mr. Totaro said, he decided to release a transcript.
He decided against releasing an audiotape of the calls after discussing the issue with the state police commissioner, Jeffrey Miller, and concluding that to do so “would only serve to further traumatize the victim’s family and the family of the perpetrator,” Mr. Totaro said.
The state police are now considering whether to release a transcript from their dispatch tapes, which would include additional conversations, a spokeswoman, Trooper Linette Quinn, said.
“We’ve never released them before, but this is a different set of circumstances,” Trooper Quinn said.