On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Laura Rockefeller went to the 106th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center for a temporary job.
She was 41, an actress and singer trying to build a life in Manhattan around the unpredictable rhythms of the theater. Between artistic projects, she took temporary jobs to pay the rent and keep moving toward the life she imagined for herself.
That morning, the assignment was simple enough. For two days, she was to help organize a conference at Windows on the World, the restaurants and event spaces at the top of the North Tower.
She was not a permanent employee. It was the sort of temporary work she took on between one project and the next.
But it was where her life ended.
On the same floor that morning was William “Bill” Hill Kelly Jr., a 30-year-old visitor attending the conference Laura was helping organize. He was there on behalf of his employer, Bloomberg L.P., where he had begun working in sales only a year earlier.
He, too, was not a World Trade Center employee.
Chance brought Bill and Laura together in the North Tower that morning. Years later, another kind of chance would bring their sisters, Colleen Kelly and Terry Rockefeller, together — this time in the work of trying to make sense of what had been lost.
Bill’s family remembers him as someone who loved life and loved being around people. He loved the ocean. He loved to surf.
He had only just begun what might have been a long life in New York.
Then, in a matter of moments, it was gone.
A quarter-century later, the families of Bill and Laura still return to that morning.
They remember what they knew, what they did not know, the calls that went unanswered and the hours in which information seemed impossible to find. And beneath those memories lies another question, one that cannot be answered:
Who would they have become?
Colleen Kelly, Bill’s sister, is a nurse and a peace activist who lives in New York. On the morning of the attacks, the family did not know that Bill was in Manhattan, near the World Trade Center.
After the planes struck, relatives began calling her, asking about him. She reassured them that he was probably safe. There was little reason to think he was at the towers. His company’s New York office was some distance away.
Only later did the family learn that Bill had gone to the World Trade Center to attend the conference on behalf of his company.
They began calling, trying to find him, at a time when reaching anyone in New York had become extraordinarily difficult.
“It was a real shock,” Colleen said. “It was horrific, the hardest moment of my life.”
And then came the questions that have remained with her.
“I wonder what his life would have been like, who he would have become, what he would have done, and what he would have thought about everything happening now,” she said.
“Above all, I hope he did not suffer.”
Unanswered Calls
Laura’s friends knew her for her warmth and for the intensity of her love for the theater.
She acted. She sang. She directed. She was always looking for the next opportunity, the next production, the next chance to step onto a stage in New York.
Between those opportunities came the temporary jobs.
Event organizing was one of them.
The conference at Windows on the World was the last.
She never knew Bill personally, though their paths crossed that morning in a place neither would leave alive.
At about 6:30 a.m., Laura left her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and headed toward the North Tower.
Laura Rockefeller (right). Photo: Terry Rockefeller
She was working temporarily for Risk Waters, a London-based company that organized conferences for financial executives. Her assignment was to help with the conference that day, her sister Terry told MBN.
Terry, like Bill’s family, had no idea her sister was at the World Trade Center.
When news of the attacks came, she called Laura.
Laura did not answer.
At first, Terry was not frightened. She thought perhaps Laura had gone out for a walk with her dog.
So, she called again.
And again.
Later, a mutual friend called and told her that Laura had been at the World Trade Center that morning.
Then an elevator operator in Laura’s apartment building confirmed that she had left around 6:30 a.m.
The pieces were beginning to fit together.
Laura had left early. She had been heading to Windows on the World.
At the end of that day, Terry still had no official confirmation that her sister was dead.
But she was beginning to understand.
She told their parents that she did not believe Laura had survived.
“It was a day filled with anxiety because there was no news,” Terry said. “It was horrible to explain it to my parents, who were very elderly.”
Gestures of Kindness, Unending Grief
She remembers one of the days that followed. She took a taxi to a center established to support families of the victims. When she arrived, the driver refused to take her money.
Such gestures, she said, were common in those days — small acts of kindness in a city overwhelmed by grief.
But kindness could not undo the loss.
And for Terry, the loss of Laura never became something that simply receded into the past.
Laura had wanted to make a life in theater and singing.
“She loved the theater,” Terry said. “And she loved New York because it was filled with the cultural circles she wanted to be part of.”
There were supposed to be more roles. More songs. More auditions. More ordinary mornings.
There was supposed to be time.
Twenty-five years later, Bill and Laura’s story remains tied to a case that has still not reached its conclusion: the prosecution of those accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks.
The attacks killed Bill and Laura and thousands of others.
More than two decades later, the legal proceedings continue, entangled in disputes over evidence, detention conditions and the military commissions system at Guantánamo.
For the families of Bill and Laura, the case has never been simply about punishment.
It is about knowing what happened. About accountability. About reaching a judgment that might offer some measure of justice after so many years.
The case became mired in legal complications, with years spent negotiating possible agreements to resolve it. One agreement, which would have spared some defendants the death penalty, was eventually withdrawn.
A trial for four defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of being the mastermind of the attacks, has been scheduled for June 2028.
For Colleen, the wait has become almost its own chapter of the story.
“For 14 years, we have been stuck in a cycle of pretrial hearings,” she said. “It has been incredibly painful to follow what has happened all these years.”
Waiting for Justice
She had expected something different.
“I expected justice to come much faster, and I expected those responsible for my brother’s death to be held accountable.”
Other terrorism cases, she points out, have moved through trials and produced verdicts.
Sept. 11 remains unfinished.
“We have not reached an end to this case the way others have,” she said.
For Colleen, the evidence itself remains a source of frustration.
She believes fundamental questions about the attacks have never been adequately answered.
“Who planned it? How? Who sent the money? Who bought the tickets? Who was involved? Who knew what, and when did they know it?”
One of the most divisive moments came with the proposed agreement that would have spared some of the defendants the death penalty. The proposal split the families of the victims.
For Terry, however, there was something important about the possibility of an agreement: It would have brought guilty pleas and final sentences, rather than allowing the case to remain suspended in a seemingly endless legal process.
There was another reason.
Until convicted, the defendants remained legally innocent.
Other legal questions have also slowed the case, including the decision to keep it within the military commissions system, according to lawyers who previously spoke with MBN.
The military system was intended, in part, to move the case forward. Instead, it introduced another layer of complexity.
The judges, prosecutors and most defense lawyers are active-duty military personnel.
Assignments change. Every two or three years, new people arrive and must learn a case that has accumulated years of hearings, evidence and legal disputes.
Then there is Guantánamo.
Pushing for Peace
Colleen describes the logistics almost as a symbol of how complicated the process has become.
Judges and court staff, relatives of the victims, journalists, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, defense lawyers and prosecutors all travel on the same plane to Guantánamo, where they spend a week attending hearings before flying home again.
To Colleen, it represents not only logistical difficulty but a “waste of resources.”
After years of pretrial hearings, Terry says she would have preferred the case to be tried in federal court, as other terrorism cases have been.
She believes the military commissions have prolonged the proceedings and left families without access to enough evidence and information to understand what happened.
Still, she does not describe what she wants as closure.
She does not believe there is such a thing.
Losing Laura is not something she can simply put behind her.
The words that come closest to what she seeks are different ones: “justice,” “resolution” and “certainty.”
But even now, with a trial date on the calendar, she is not sure the proceedings will begin as scheduled. Nor does she know how long they might continue once they finally begin.
Over the years, Colleen and Terry, along with other Sept. 11 families, came to believe that justice should not create more victims.
The people responsible for the attacks, they believed, should be held accountable. But the pursuit of accountability did not justify causing suffering to others.
In the months after the attacks, the sisters joined other families in calling for a peaceful response.
In 2002, they helped establish Sept. 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization formed by relatives of victims who sought to promote peace and dialogue rather than retaliation.
In January 2003, Colleen traveled to Iraq with a delegation that met with Iraqi civilians and listened to their experiences, only weeks before the United States invaded.
American security policy had entered a new era after Sept.11. The “war on terror” was expanding, and Washington was preparing for the invasion of Iraq — a decision that would profoundly reshape the region.
For Terry, the work became an effort to “build relationships marked by greater empathy and compassion, leading toward a better future than the one produced by the pursuit of revenge.” In Iraq, she worked with human rights activists, women’s rights advocates and labor leaders. They spoke to her about their country and about the future they wanted to build.
When Terry returned to Baghdad in 2021, she saw signs of wealth and development in parts of the city. But she also saw people living in residential buildings that, she said, “lacked even walls — a tragic situation that cannot be justified under any circumstances.”
She does not see that work as separate from Laura. Nor does she see it as separate from the morning when her sister left her apartment and headed toward the North Tower.
The loss of Laura shaped the way Terry chose to respond to Sept. 11. Her answer was not to deny the pain, but to try to prevent that pain from becoming a reason for more suffering. Neither she nor Colleen speaks of moving on.
There is no clean ending to a life that ends at 41, or at 30. And so, 25 years later, the sisters still return to the same unanswered questions.
What would Bill’s life have become?
What would Laura’s have looked like?
What opportunities would have found them?
What ordinary mornings would they have lived through?
The questions cannot bring them back.
But they remain.
And in that sense, the story of Bill and Laura did not end on Sept. 11.
