Caller offered me $1m to get wife out of World Trade Center on 9/11, says police dispatcher

A POLICE dispatcher taking calls on 9/11 has told how the husband of a woman trapped in the World Trade Center offered her a million dollars to get his partner out alive.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Gladys Mitchell, now 62, said: “It’s like a nightmare. It will never go away.”

Based at the emergency dispatch centre in Brooklyn, the keen singer was due to perform the national anthem that day at an official ceremony.

She was told to “look busy” and take calls as she waited.

Gladys told The Sun: “The first caller said, ‘Don’t think I’m crazy but I just saw a plane go into the World Trade Center’.

“We’re supposed to take everything at face value but I was thinking, ‘It’s too early in the morning for this craziness!’ Then mayhem broke out behind me.”

What she heard on later calls affects her to this day.

Gladys said of one desperate caller: “He told me his wife was in the building

"She’d called him and she couldn’t get out. He said, ‘I’ll give you any amount of money — a million dollars, whatever you want — to get her out safe’.”

The mum of three, who retired in 2008 and is now pursuing a singing career, said: “I kept hearing a thump (while talking to officers) and I asked what it was.

"They told me, ‘Those are bodies hitting the ground. They’re jumping out of windows. We can’t get them to stop’

“Those things haunt me.”