I remember seeing this case on Unsolved Mysteries and feeling a little freaked out by
the 911 call.
I've transcribed the call below and included some of my own interpretations.
BUFFALO GROVE: 911, Marge.
CALLER: Yeah. Uhh. Send an ambulance or police or someone to 1765 Stonehedge Court in Wheeling immediately. There’s, uh, one young woman in there who’s not breathing—she’s turning blue!
BUFFALO GROVE: Alright, hold on just a minute, alright? ‘Cause this is Buffalo Grove, just a minute.
CALLER: That’s uh—
BUFFALO GROVE: Hold on just a minute, okay? I’m gonna try and transfer you. Hold on a second.
BUFFALO GROVE: Hello?
(Ring. Caller believes the “hello” is from the operator he’s just been transferred to and therefore begins his speech again. The part in brackets is barely audible)
CALLER: [Yeah, send somebody] to 1765—
BUFFALO GROVE: Hold on just a minute.
CALLER: No, no, no, there’s no time!
WHEELING: Wheeling police. Kelly.
CALLER (with less emotion): Yeah, send someone to 1765 Stonehedge Court in Wheeling—immediately. There’s a young woman there who’s not breathing. She’s turning blue.
WHEELING: 1765 Stonehenge?
CALLER: Stonehedge. Hedge, like a bush.
WHEELING: Okay, in Wheeling?
CALLER: Yeah.
WHEELING: What phone number are you calling from?
CALLER (almost dismissive): Oh I don’t know, it’s a public phone.
BUFFALO GROVE: Wheeling, can you hear me? This is Buffalo Grove 911.
WHEELING: Yeah, I can barely hear ya.
BUFFALO GROVE (suspicious): Alright, he’s calling from an address in Buffalo Grove.
CALLER (flatly): Yeah.
BUFFALO GROVE: Alright... when were you at that house, sir?
CALLER: Bye. (hangs up)
BUFFALO GROVE: Sir?
I honestly don't know what to make of this call, so I have to break it down for myself.
THE CALLER'S TONE
On the one hand, my first instinct is to be immediately suspicious of the caller. At first he sounds a little emotional, but like he's trying to remain calm in order to be coherent. I remember hearing once that if you ever have to call 911, you should try to resist the natural urge to panic and just state your location first. This helps the operator send you assistance faster. I kinda got that impression here from the man. He led with an exact address and a reason for the emergency.
However, as the call goes on and he begins to speak to the Wheeling 911 operator, his answers become flat, one-worded, and even dismissive. You'd think that now that he's talking to Wheeling,
where the actual emergency is taking place, he'd offer more information.
THE CALLER'S LOCATION
Now, it's obvious the Buffalo Grove dispatcher becomes suspicious of him because he called Buffalo Grove 911 in order to report an emergency in Wheeling. This suggests he wanted to took the time to distance himself from the area before calling.
However,
this article states "The call was made from a pay phone at a shopping center at Buffalo Grove and Dundee roads, a few blocks from the victim’s home." Sure enough,
according to Google, the shopping center is about a 10-minute walk from Jamie's home. In fact, Buffalo Grove Road
marks the border between the villages of Buffalo Grove and Wheeling, so by calling 911 from across that road, he was already in another jurisdiction, making him seem miles, and not minutes away.
A counter-argument to this, though, is: were there no other pay-phones anywhere along that 10-minute walk? If he really felt this was an emergency, couldn't he have knocked on a neighbor's door and asked for help?
THE CALLER'S KNOWLEDGE
More suspicion comes from the fact that the caller says "she's not breathing—she's turning blue!"
According to a later investigation, Jamie was found "on the floor in her bedroom," thus out of view for most passers-by. How could the caller have seen her and noticed her lack of breathing unless he was there?
However, the
Unsolved Mysteries episode makes it seem like Jamie lived on the ground floor, so technically anyone walking by could've looked in and seen her. Another possibility I've seen is that maybe this guy was a peeping tom who had been spying on Jamie for a while. He could've been using binoculars which let him see that she was turning blue and not breathing, panicked, realized he had to report it but in such a way as to not reveal his voyeurism. This fits with the conjectured age of the caller, who "
sounds like a man in his 40s", and so might've liked to spy on a beautiful, 27-year-old "young woman," as he referred to her.
JAMIE'S TIME OF DEATH
The caller said that Jamie was not breathing and was turning blue, which suggests she was not dead yet. Jamie "
was suffocated with a pillow", but I haven't found an estimated time of death. If she had indeed died shortly before
LE found her at 11:36am, then maybe the caller was not involved because why report someone who could potentially live and implicate you in the assault? But if she had been dead for some time, then it's possible he just said that to take suspicion away from him.
POLICE OPINION
An article appearing just one year after the murder quotes Deputy Police Chief Michael Hermes as saying: "'This investigation leads us to believe the person who called 911 on Oct. 28, 1991, was not the person responsible for Jamie`s death.'" I wonder, though, if they really believe that, or if they're just saying that, hoping to make the man feel comfortable enough to come forward.
I also note the following apparent contradiction. In the
Unsolved Mysteries episode, William Benson from the Wheeling Police Department said, "There's evidence of a struggle." But
according to this article one year after the murder, "Hermes said investigators have all but ruled out a woman as the killer because of the lack of a violent struggle at the scene."
MY OWN OPINION
I don't think the caller was involved in the actual murder. If he had killed her, I think it would've been simpler for him to just hightail it out of there quickly and quietly, instead of going straight to a busy shopping center on a Monday morning at 11:30am, where he would've been surrounded by witnesses, in order to call the police, of all things.
However, it's clear the man had something to hide. And so I like the voyeur theory. He could've been watching her for a while, and when he tried to again that morning, he was shocked to find her lifeless. He panicked and opted to report her anonymously in order to avoid having to answer how he found her. I think his flat and dismissive tone towards the end of the call comes from being transferred and having to start his story all over again as well as having to correct the Wheeling dispatcher on the street name. Maybe he got annoyed when asked what phone he was calling from because that was wasting precious time.
But when the Buffalo Grove dispatcher spoke again, he realized immediately that she was suspicious of him, and that's when he hung up and why he's never come forward.
SOURCES:
The Mysterious Murder of Jamie Santos - Unsolved Mysteries
MYSTERY MAN ASKED TO HELP FIND KILLER
1991 Wheeling murder of Jamie Santos goes 20 years unsolved | ABC7 Chicago | abc7chicago.com
Police Seek Clues In Wheeling Murder, 20 Years Later
WHO KILLED JAMIE SANTOS?