Rosemary Kahles was selling cars at a Pinellas dealership when the loudspeaker summoned her to the office. Her husband was on the phone.
Bob Kahles sounded tired, depressed.
"Honey, I love you," he said. "But I just can't take it anymore. I shouldn't have had that boy working for us."
Then Rosemary Kahles heard a bang.
It was March 25, 1991. Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. had just claimed another victim.
Bob and Rosie Kahles moved to Tampa from Minnesota in 1981 with $300 between them and a family of seven to feed.
They worked a series of jobs until they got the money to open their own wrecking service on north Florida Avenue. Bob labored to make it work.
"He was real strong," said Mrs. Kahles, now 37. "He had a lot of tenacity."
Then, sometime in November 1986, the Kahleses hired a new driver named Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. It didn't take long to know there was something strange about the man nicknamed "Needles."
"He was always playing with knives, acting tough," Mrs. Kahles said.
On Dec. 4, 1986, the Kahleses got a job up in Pasco County. Bolin begged to take it alone. He needed the money.
Kahles didn't want to let him go. Rules were rules. A driver had to spend six weeks in training before he could go out alone. But Mrs. Kahles wanted to give the boy a chance. Bob Kahles relented.
Bolin took out a one-ton wrecker with dual rear wheels. Kahles thought one of the inner wheels looked a little flat, so he had Bolin take a small club that Mrs. Kahles kept in her car.
It was wooden, 2-feet long, with a metal tip at the end. One of Mrs. Kahles' sons had made it for her protection back in Minnesota. Bolin could use it to bang on the tire to make sure it was inflated.
Within a few hours, the Kahleses knew they had made a mistake. They couldn't raise Bolin on the radio. At first, they thought he had stolen the wrecker.
Late that night, they got a call on the radio they kept in their home. It was fading in and out, but they heard Bolin. He said he was lost in Pasco County.
When he finally showed up about 10 the next morning, Kahles fired him.
"He was in real bad shape," Mrs. Kahles said. "You could see he was afraid."
It was not the last strange thing that happened, though. Bob Kahles briefly rehired Bolin, at Rosie's urging, then fired him again after another confrontation.
During that time, Mrs. Kahles distinctly remembers sitting in the office when a television show came on about the murders of Teri Lynn Matthews and Stephanie Collins.
Bolin, she says, saw the broadcast and grew excited. He ran to the back of the shop and called several of the other drivers to come watch the show.
"Aren't they pretty?" she recalls Bolin asking. "Aren't they petite?"
She remembers wondering how Bolin knew the women were small. The full import didn't strike her until many years later.
In July 1990, Bolin's ex-wife called a police tip line in Indiana.
Within a short time, Bolin was indicted for murdering three women: Natalie Blanche Holley, 25, Stephanie Collins, 17, and Teri Lynn Matthews, 26.
When investigators found that Bolin, now accused as a serial killer, had worked for the Kahleses, they seized almost all the couple's wreckers in a search for clues.
Mrs. Kahles can't remember how long the police had them, but it was long enough to hurt.
"It seemed like forever," she said. "The trucks supplied the business. They brought in the work to the body shop, the towing. We had payments to make, and they weren't making any money."
Unable to keep up with bills, the couple turned the business over to their sons, but it later folded.
Then, came another blow. Investigators determined that Bolin used the Kahleses' wrecker to dump Teri Lynn Matthews' body in woods in central Pasco County.
Bob Kahles videotaped news reports about the three dead women. He sat at home for hours, playing the tape again and again. He began to sink into a depression he never escaped.
"I tried to get him to get medical help, but he absolutely refused," Mrs. Kahles said. "There was nothing I could do.
"He took the responsibility for Bolin on his own back. He thought that if the guy hadn't worked for him and if it wasn't for him being in that truck, that little girl wouldn't have died.
"He talked about (Matthews) as if she was a little girl. He hated Oscar. He took it real hard."
On March 25, 1991, according to Hillsborough sheriff's reports, Kahles put a .25-caliber gun to his head and called his wife. As he was talking, he shot himself once in the head.
He lingered for several days in a vegetative state. Finally, Mrs. Kahles ordered life support ended. Even then, it wasn't the end. Her grandmother died of a heart attack a day after hearing the news.
Mrs. Kahles, entombed in her own depression, locked herself in her room, putting tin foil over the windows to allow no light in.
Toward the end of 1991, she gave away many possessions, stored what was left and simply drove away.
She ended up Gulfport, Miss. Recovery was still down the road.
Mrs. Kahles now works at an auto dealership in Gulfport running special promotions. She also brokers real estate deals in the burgeoning casino business.
She has started to turn her life around.
The last hurdle was testifying at the murder trial that ended last week with Bolin's conviction for Matthews' murder.
"It all hit me like a ton of bricks," she said. "It's over and over, and it's done."
Unlike her husband, Mrs. Kahles was never convinced Bolin was the killer. During Bolin's first trial in 1992, she was too withdrawn to pay much attention to the evidence.
This time, she learned something new: n eyewitness testified to seeing Bolin beat Matthews 10 to 15 times in the head with a small, 2-foot wooden club with a metal tip.
She realized then that the murder weapon was the small club her husband loaned Bolin, the club she had taken back and carried in the back of her car the past 10 years. Investigators had never thought to ask her for it. It was not introduced at last week's trial.
Mrs. Kahles returned to Gulfport after her testimony. Then she erased her last link to Oscar Ray Bolin Jr.
"I went back to the car and I just trashed that thing," she said. "I dumped it. I didn't want any part of that thing."
