Glenda Tucker, Larry Reed’s girl friend, was left hanging on the telephone. According to the police synopsis of her account, “Reed said, ‘Wait a minute,’ that he wanted to put on his trousers. She did not hear any shootings from inside the building. She hung up when Reed failed to return to the phone and called back to the motel clerk. The clerk told her there was trouble in that part of the motel and she could not connect her.”
Miss Gilmore, the clerk, told the police, “After the [first phase of the] shooting stopped, a girl called, and Clara Gilmore answered the phone at the switchboard. The girl asked if anyone had been shot. She said she had been talking to her boy friend, Cleveland Reed, in room A-3. Miss Gilmore picked up the phone to A-3, and the line was open. She listened and heard someone yell, ‘Get your hands up.’ A few seconds later, someone yelled, ‘Watch out, he’s got the back of the gun,’ then she heard several shots. She then pulled the plug.”
“I called back over there about twelve,” Mrs. Gill, Carl Cooper’s mother, told me, “and talked to the girl on the switchboard, and she said she couldn’t accept any calls and I said, ‘Well, why?’—you know. And she said, ‘I just can’t accept any calls right now. Soon as I get a line clear.’ And I said, ‘Well, what’s going on?’ And she said, ‘Nothing. It’s quiet over here.’ So that was a puzzle to me, you know. Like I say, I was nervous for some reason.”
Carl was already dead.