The Savage City (21 page)

The Whitmore case was like a virus that had entered the system through the usual channels but could not be easily expunged. Whitmore now had advocates who were altering the way he was perceived by the general public. The young man scorned as a “nineteen-year-old pimple-faced hoodlum” a year and a half before was now “the most celebrated wrong man in the history of the city,” according to the
Herald Tribune
. For groups like the NAACP, CORE, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and others, Whitmore was a cause célèbre, routinely cited in the press as a symbol of injustice. The newspapers, some of which had helped to frame Whitmore in the eyes of the public, took up his case on the editorial pages. When the NYPD announced it was launching an
investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Whitmore confession, the
New York Times
asked, “Can the police be relied on to investigate alleged misconduct by their own department?” It was a fair and logical question, but also a revolutionary one: at the time it was unheard of for a newspaper to challenge the authority of the police.

 

BY THE FALL
of 1965, the prosecution of Ricky Robles for the Career Girls Murders returned George Whitmore to the front pages. Among other things, the trial promised to be a referendum on police practices in New York City. The city's bad cops had elicited a wrongful confession from the wrong man; its good cops had stepped in to correct their work and nail the true killer. The Wylie-Hoffert murder trial had been years in the making; it captured national attention and riveted New Yorkers with all the drama of a public tribunal.

The man on trial in that fall of 1965 was Ricky Robles, but the figure at the center of the storm was George Whitmore. For the Manhattan D.A.'s office to prove that Robles was the man who had murdered Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, they would also have to show that the Whitmore confession was erroneous. This meant that Whitmore himself would be called to the witness stand in yet another trial—this time for the prosecution. This was a complete reversal for George: in this case the Manhattan D.A. was his friend, the man who would show that his Brooklyn confession, at least with regard to the Wylie-Hoffert murders, was not to be believed. The defense attorney, on the other hand, had a vested interest in giving the impression that the Whitmore confession was accurate, that Whitmore and not his client, Ricky Robles, had committed the killings.

In anticipation of the trial, George was moved from the Brooklyn House of Detention to the Queens House of Detention in Kew Gardens, a newer and more hospitable facility. Assistant D.A. John F. Keenan, chief of the Manhattan D.A.'s Homicide Bureau, was handling the Wylie-Hoffert murder case. Keenan was a Hogan protégé, a fellow Irish Catholic, with the steely will and colorless personality of a devout public servant. He met with Whitmore once before the trial—in the presence of attorney Stanley Reiben—to discuss George's testimony. Whitmore was startled by Keenan's solicitous manner; it was the first time any representative of the D.A.'s office had treated him like a human being.

The trial had been under way for almost a month by the time Whitmore was called to testify, on the morning of November 12, 1965. George was twenty-one years old now. He had added some weight, his complexion clear, and he wore the black-rimmed glasses that were now a permanent fixture. He seemed more confident, perhaps because he was becoming familiar with the trappings of courtroom jargon and etiquette, or perhaps because this time he himself wasn't on trial. He had nothing to lose.

Whitmore was anxious to convey exactly how he'd been tricked into signing away his life and freedom. He was feistier on the witness stand than he had been, more willing to impute nefarious motives to his police interrogators. During cross-examination, Robles's cocounsel Jack Hoffinger read large sections of Whitmore's “Q and A transcript” from the night he was arrested. “Were you asked these questions, and did you make these answers?”

“No, sir,” said George. “The question was asked, but I didn't know, so they told me.”

“Who told you?”

“One of the detectives—I was asked what I saw. I said I was never in the house, that I was not in the building, so he insisted that when I went into the building and pushed the door open, the first thing I was supposed to have saw was soda bottles. Everything was suggested to me in this way.”

“Didn't there come a time when [Assistant D.A.] Peter Koste came into a room, brought you in and Mister Koste himself asked you questions? Didn't that happen?”

Whitmore paused; the lingering confusion and despair that had dogged him for the last two years returned, and he started to sweat. So many names, dates, events. No, he answered, Koste had only asked “my name and address.”

“Didn't Mister Koste ask you these questions I have been reading from?” George was asked.

“No, sir,” he replied.

It was a curious moment: it had already been established at the trial that Peter Koste was the assistant D.A. who took down Whitmore's statement. George had nothing to gain by lying about this detail. And yet he seemed so certain in his misremembrance. Later in his testimony, he denied that he had initialed the sketch drawing of the murder scene
and various pages of Koste's stenographic transcript, though the penmanship on these pages was clearly his.

Whitmore's denial of such basic facts had little bearing on the case against Robles, but it did show how thoroughly George had been worn down. It appeared that he was no longer able to reconstruct what happened to him on that long night at the precinct in Brooklyn.

The trial's big moment came when Assistant D.A. Keenan called Eddie Bulger to the stand. Bulger had conveniently retired from the police force a few weeks before the trial began—and then disappeared. The D.A.'s office had tried to track him down, but he had apparently gone into hiding. His daughter said he was on an “extended tour of the southern states.” A judge threatened to call Bulger's son, a detective in the Seventy-eighth Precinct in Brooklyn, into court to reveal his father's whereabouts. Two days later, Eddie Bulger responded to his subpoena.

Bulger strutted into court, tanned and cocky. If he felt he'd been forced to retire under a cloud, you couldn't tell by looking at him. Eddie Bulger apologized to no one.

“Mister Bulger, have you ever seen me before?” asked Keenan.

“No, sir,” answered the former detective.

Keenan led Bulger through an outline of his police career, including the many commendations and promotions he'd received before his retirement, with full pension, after twenty-seven years of service. Bulger may have been lulled into a false sense of security by the time Keenan asked a seemingly innocuous question: “You have shaved with a razor, right?”

“I have an electric,” said Bulger.

Keenan then led the detective headlong into his “discovery” of an empty razor packet found in the bathroom of the Wylie-Hoffert apartment. “Do you know, Detective Bulger, that blades that come from dispensers have arrows on them, did you know that?”

Bulger was confused. “Arrows?”

He admitted that he'd never seen the actual blade found in the murder room—the blade used to slice sheets for tying up Wylie and Hoffert.

Keenan showed Bulger the evidence—a blade sealed in a glassine bag—and pointed out the telltale arrows. This proved that the blade came from a dispenser, not from a wrapped razor packet, as Whitmore had supposedly “confessed” to leaving behind in the bathroom.

Asked Keenan: “Did you know there was a razor blade dispenser in the bureau drawer in the room the girls were found in?”

At one time, Bulger had believed he knew everything there was to know about the Wylie-Hoffert case. “No, sir,” he answered, in a subdued voice.

“Now, when you question a suspect, Detective Bulger, are you always polite to them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You ask them what happened, you don't feed them information?”

“No, sir.”

“You don't tell them they did something, you ask them did they do something, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you speak in the tone of voice you speak to us here…polite, calm, when you question a suspect?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you remember questioning a certain window washer by the name of Eddie White?”

Hoffinger, the defense attorney, interjected: “I am going to object to this, Your Honor.”

The judge: “Objection overruled.”

Bulger answered, “I don't recall.”

Keenan: “Do you remember questioning a young Negro man about twenty-four years of age, you and a Detective Branker of the Bronx Homicide Squad doing the questioning, in December, shortly after December sixteen of nineteen sixty-three?”

“Oh, we questioned a lot of people.” Bulger's response was a tad too jovial; he would have known that he'd been working the Wylie-Hoffert case in that time frame.

Keenan showed Bulger a report on the incident that Bulger had made out and signed. “Does that refresh your recollection?”

“Yes.”

“Do you recall questioning a Mister Eddie White?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember saying to Mister White, leaning across the desk in the presence of Sergeant Brent of the Twenty-third Squad, and hitting your hand on the desk, ‘You're the guy who did this…. You saw the door and walked in, you saw the bottles on the floor and picked them up, and you saw Janice nude.' Do you recall saying that?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you recall saying to Mister White then, ‘Alright, get out of here. But I'm not through with you yet.' Do you recall saying any such thing?”

“No, sir.”

“You deny that happened?”

“No, sir.”

“You don't deny that happened?”

“I do deny it.”

Keenan moved in for the kill. He held up the photograph of a blond girl that Bulger had taken from Whitmore's wallet. The prosecutor asked the detective about his reaction when Whitmore told him he found the photo at a garbage dump in Wildwood. Bulger acknowledged that he told Whitmore he didn't believe him.

Asked Keenan: “When you told him you didn't believe him when he said that he got it from a dump in Wildwood, were you looking at his stomach? Did you notice his stomach moving in and out?”

Bewilderment rippled through the jury box and spectators' gallery.

“I'm sorry,” said Bulger. “What do you mean?”

“Whitmore was a young Negro boy. Didn't you tell Mister Koste and Mister Glass on July thirty, in this very building, that you can always tell when a Negro boy is lying by watching his stomach, because it moves in and out when he lies?”

Bulger seemed stunned. He looked beyond Keenan at Assistant D.A. Mel Glass, seated at the prosecution table. “I don't remember saying it.”

“You don't remember saying it or you didn't say it? Which?”

“I'm not saying I didn't say it, but I don't remember saying it.”

“You might have said it?”

“I might have.”

Keenan spent the rest of the day grilling Bulger. The following morning, he moved on to Detective Joe Di Prima.

At the Minnie Edmonds murder trial, Di Prima had been put forth by prosecutors as a paragon of virtue (“didn't he fairly exude character…compassion…and, yes, even a fatherly-type sensitivity?”). Well, that was then, this was now. Keenan set Di Prima off on a rambling, equivocating series of answers by asking, “Did anyone in your presence tell Whitmore the girls were alive?”

“No, sir,” said Di Prima from the witness stand.

“Did anyone in your presence tell Whitmore the girls were dead?”

“I don't recall.”

“Isn't it a fact, Detective Di Prima, that you told Mister Koste that so far as Whitmore knew, the girls were still alive?”

“I said to Mister Koste—” Di Prima paused, decided on a different tack. “I'll give you a yes answer with reservations.”

Keenan asked Di Prima if he remembered testifying at the Edmonds trial. Yes, Di Prima remembered. Did Di Prima remember saying, under oath, that there was no way he could have fed the address of the Wylie-Hoffert murders to Whitmore because “he didn't even know the address”? Did he say those words? asked Keenan.

“If it is on the record, I did,” answered the detective.

Keenan then established that Di Prima had, in fact, visited the building numerous times to see a physician there and knew full well that it was the exact address where the Wylie-Hoffert murders took place. “So you knew the killings were in Fifty-seven East Eighty-eighth Street before you questioned Whitmore?”

“That's right.”

“But you did testify, ‘I didn't even know the address of the place'?”

Di Prima turned to the judge. “Your Honor, can I elaborate on that?”

“You may not,” answered the justice.

“What was the truth when you testified in court?” Keenan pressed.

“I can't answer that question without elaborating,” said Di Prima. “My answer of yes would be misconstrued.”

Later, in his summation, Keenan said of the detective: “Mister Di Prima's word is not worth anything.” This man, who at previous trials had “exuded character,” was now characterized as a common perjurer.

The remainder of the trial zeroed in on Ricky Robles, the new figure to be vilified. There were more witnesses, more evidence, arguments, and counterarguments. After closing statements and the judge's instructions to the jury, deliberations began. It took five hours and fifty-five minutes for the jury to declare Robles guilty as charged.

At a press conference afterward, a
Herald Tribune
reporter asked a police spokesman what departmental action might be considered as a result of Keenan's accusations against Bulger and Di Prima. Detective Bulger, the spokesman noted, had retired thirty days ago. He was now a private citizen, beyond the reach of departmental discipline. As for Di Prima, he said, “any action would be up to the district attorney. He is
alleging a crime.” But no disciplinary charges were ever filed against Di Prima; he too retired a short time later, with a “spotless record” and a full pension.