The Savage City (8 page)
Authors: T. J. English
Bulger ducked back into the squad commander's office and whispered into Detective Di Prima's ear. He showed him the photo from Whitmore's wallet. And with that George Whitmore was pushed further down the rabbit hole into a world of confusion and dread.
They took him into another room, a small eight-by-twelve-foot
interrogation room with a window so grimy you couldn't see through it, where Bulger told him they would have “more privacy.” Careful not to mention anything about rape or murder, Bulger started interrogating Whitmore about the photo.
The questions embarrassed George. He'd found the photo months earlier while scavenging at the town dump in Wildwood. He'd liked the look of the pretty, blond-haired white girl in the photo, and put it in his wallet. Later, he wrote on the back of it: “To George from Louise.” It was a ruse he hoped to use to impress friends and family:
See,
he could say,
this is my white girlfriend.
Flustered, George tried lying to the detectives, telling them Louise was a girl he knew who'd given him the photo. They didn't believe him. Reluctantly, George told them the truth: he'd found the photo in the garbage and written the inscription on the back himself. The detectives didn't believe that, either. Di Prima asked, “Couldn't you have gotten this picture off Eighty-eighth Street?â¦Didn't you go into Eighty-eighth Street and go into an apartment and take this picture?”
At first Whitmore was resistant, butâjust as he'd been doing all day longâhe eventually relented and told the cops what they wanted to hear.
Linking George to the horrible events of August 28, 1963, was a slow and torturous process. Whitmore had never been to the Upper East Side of Manhattan; he'd never stepped farther into Manhattan than the Port Authority bus station, where he caught the subway to Brooklyn. If the detectives wanted to create a plausible scenario in which Whitmore somehow made his way to the Wylie-Hoffert residence, entered the apartment, raped Janice Wylie, then brutally murdered her and her roommate, they had a tough job ahead of them.
Recalled Whitmore:
They asked me what building was I supposed to go in on 88th Street. I told them I don't know. And they said I had went into the building and went upstairs, and I told them that I didn't went into the building. They said, “Sure you went into the building and you went upstairs.” And I said, “Yeah, I went to the roof.” And he says, “No,” he says, “didn't you see a door crack when you were going up?” And he says, “When you walkedâwhen you pushed the door open, what was the first thing you saw?” And I didn't say anything. I waited and I said,
“The table,” and he says, “Didn't you see soda bottles?” I said, “I don't know. I don't know.” I was confused.
The soda bottles were an important detail. Both Wylie and Hoffert had been hit over the head with a Coke bottle before they were murdered. The killer would have to know about that.
The interrogation continued. By now, Whitmore was a willing confessor, but it would still take hours to get all the details straight.
They didn't beat me. They didn't yell at me. They didn't threaten me. They wasn't even angry. They asked me didn't I grab the little girl like I grabbed Missus Edmonds, and I tried to remember what they told me about Missus Edmonds and I told 'em, “Yes, that's how I did it.” I did more. I showed 'em. I remembered and I showed 'em. They said didn't the little girl scream the way Minnie Edmonds and Missus Borrero screamed? I remembered about that from before and I told 'em that's how she screamed. They said, “If you was a burglar and you was in a home and somebody saw you, wouldn't you knock 'em out and tie 'em up?” And I said I guess a burglar would. They said if'n a burglar got scared, mightn't he cut the girls? And I said he might. I just didn't care. I was tired and I didn't care.
There were interruptions: because of a shift change, George had to be taken downstairs and booked for the Borrero and Edmonds crimes, then taken back upstairs. Somewhere along the line there was a food break, more sandwiches and soda. Then back to questioning.
“George,” he says, “do you suck pussy?”
“I'm not that kind of boy,” I says.
“I believe you,” he says, “but everybody sucks pussy.”
“I don't,” I says.
“George,” he says, “did you put cream in her pussy when she was on the floor?”
“You mean,” I says, “when she was knocked out?”
“Yeah,” he says, “when she was knocked out.”
“No,” I says, “I couldn't done somethin' like that. You gotta be terrible sick to do somethin' like that.”
The other detective, he gets up and he yells at meâ“Listen, George, if you don't give me a straight answer in five minutes I'm gonna kick you in the balls.”
After that, I told them what they wanted.
Once George figured out that the girls had been sexually assaulted and badly cut up, the thought crossed his mind that the detectives were leading him into a murder confession. “Hey,” he said, “ain't those girls gonna be mad with me?” He intended it as a trick question to find out if the girls had been killed.
“Well,” said Detective Bulger, “wait right here and I'll find out.” Bulger left the room, then returned and told Whitmore, “I just spoke to the girls on the phone. Everything's okay. They're not mad.”
By now, word had begun to spread throughout the precinct and borough command that detectives out here in the bowels of Brooklyn had stumbled across the most notorious killer in the city, and he was spilling his guts.
The first to arrive was Lieutenant Damien Salvia, the commander of the Seventy-third Detective Squad. It was Salvia's day off, but when he heard that a few of his men were about to crack the city's biggest murder case, he rushed in. He was followed by Assistant Chief Inspector Richard F. Carey, the commander of Brooklyn North Detectives. Together, the detectives and their commanders decided to wait before calling in the top brass from Manhattan. The Manhattan detectives would know the case inside out. There was still work to be done before they were ready to share George Whitmore.
Bulger and Di Prima had come up with a plausible scenario to explain how Whitmore got to the building at 57 East Eighty-eighth Street. They had even gotten George to describe how he perpetrated the act. But they needed to establish without a doubt that George had been in that apartment, that he knew the layout of the crime scene. Detective Bulger gave Whitmore a pad of paper and told him they were going to sketch a drawing of the Wylie-Hoffert apartment.
George liked to draw; it was a skill he'd once hoped would be his calling in life. But it was approaching midnight, and he was exhausted.
“Here,” said Bulger, “I'll help you.”
The veteran detective stood behind Whitmore. He put a pencil in his hand, then gripped George's hand with his own. Together, like a
puppeteer and his marionette, they began to draw the apartment layout, room by room.
Whitmore might have done better if he had glasses on. With his poor eyesight, he could hardly make out what was being put down on paper.
I was very tired, almost falling asleep. I was in a drowsy fog. The light in the room was sweating. I was sweating. The detective put a pencil in my hand and helped me sketch. He was explainin' to me where the bathroom and the bedroom wasâ¦. They said, “You stay awake; you're not goin' to sleep. As soon as we're done, we'll let you get some sleep.”
When George was finished, Bulger had him initial the drawing.
Now they had something; it was all coming together. Word went out over the police radio:
Subject in Manhattan double homicide being interrogated at Seven-Three precinct. Repeat, subject in Wylie-Hoffert homicide at Seven-Three.
The Manhattan command structure arrived all at once: Assistant Chief Inspector Coyle, Detective Lynch from the Two-Three Detective Squad, Andrew Dunleavy from Manhattan North Homicide, Lieutenant Regan from the chief's office, and the man himself, Chief of Detectives McKearney.
Over the next two or three hoursâwell past midnight and into the early-morning hoursâWhitmore was subjected to a numbing litany of accusations, harangues, and questions with predetermined answers. He was introduced to inspectors, chiefs, lieutenants, and homicide detectives. At times, as many as seven or eight men were crowded into the small interrogation room, a sea of white faces descending upon George like a blistering snowstorm. As Whitmore would later point out, “I was the only Negro guy in there. The rest of 'em were white, and at the time, they wasn't too friendly.”
By 2:00
A.M.
Whitmore's story was seemingly complete; the highly detailed diagram of the murder scene had been notarized by George. It had taken more than ten hours to lay out all the details of the Wylie-Hoffert murders and get the perp to regurgitate it all back to the investigators. Now came the hardest part: Whitmore would have to give his statement to an assistant district attorney and have it recorded by a stenographer.
Assistant district attorneys arrived from both the Brooklyn and Manhattan D.A.'s offices. Whitmore would have to give three separate statements for the three separate crimes. These statements would become the official version in the state's case against the accused, to be used by prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and jury members. They had to be perfect.
The Borrero and Edmonds confessions went off without a hitch. Seated in the squad commander's office, with the assistant D.A. and a stenographer on one side of him and detectives on the other, Whitmore gave his name, address, and date of birth, and was then led through the details of the crimes. Recalled Whitmore:
People say you must have a wonderful memory to remember all that, but it weren't so hard. Most of the questions I could tell where they were goin' cause I had good schoolin' on that. Whenever I got into trouble and forgot my answer, I'd look sideways at my detectives and they'd hint me with shakin' their head or scratchin' their nose or somethin' like that. I think even one time they whispered an answer to me.
Getting the Borrero and Edmonds confession down on paper took about an hour. The Wylie-Hoffert confession was more problematic. To make the case as airtight as possible, Bulger had filled Whitmore's head with minute details about the case. It could be confusing, but the detectives had worked out a system with George so he could keep some of the details straight.
My detectives told me if anybody ask you, the first girl you seen is the baby girl and the second one who comes in later is the mother. That's the way I can keep the girls straight in my memory. So I make believe to myself the left hand is the baby girl and the right one is the mother and when he ask me 'bout the first girl I make a fist with my left hand when he ask me 'bout the second girl I make a fist with my right for the mother. A game, kind of. That's my whole story. That's the whole story of a Negro boy who never hurt nobody, in the police precinct on Friday that April.
The assistant D.A. from Manhattan was Peter Koste. He should have been suspicious when the detectives warned him ahead of time that Whitmore probably believed that Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were still alive. That was the first of many details that went against normal protocol. It was within Koste's job description to question the detectives about their methods of interrogation, but Koste found himself in a Brooklyn precinct surrounded by two dozen detectives and high-ranking police officials, all of whom could hardly contain their excitement at the prospect of breaking the case. As far as these men were concerned, taking down Whitmore's confession was a formality. Koste was expected to do his part.
It was a nerve-racking process. George had been prepared well, but occasionally there were details that he and the detectives hadn't gone over. For instance, at one point Assistant D.A. Koste asked Whitmore about the building at 57 East Eighty-eighth Street.
Q: What kind of building?
A: About a four-story house.
Q: Four-story house, you think it was?
A: Yes.
Q: What did you do when you spotted this four-story house? You think it was four stories?
A: Four or five stories.
Apparently, the number of stories in the building had never come up. At this point, as the finished transcript noted, “Detective Bulger leaves room.” Twenty questions later, Bulger returned and the questioning veered back to the height of the building.
Q: You mentioned that this building was about four or five stories, could it have been eight or ten stories?
A: I don't know if it's that high or not.
Q: Could it have been eight stories?
A: Yes.
Q: But it could have been more than four or five stories?
A: Yes.
The questioning continued in a similar manner. Whenever there was confusion about an important detail, the detectives ducked out of the room, figured out the answer among themselves, then returned. The line of inquiry would return to important details to make sure they were clarified in the transcript. The investigators were determined to cover everything. George had even been supplied with a story about how, after committing the murders, he had retrieved a package of razor blades from the bathroom. He opened the package and took out a blade, used it to slice a bedsheet into strips, and then used the strips of cloth to tie up the bodies.
The detectives and the assistant D.A. worked as a team. The inspectors and chiefs were there to make sure everyone dotted their
i
's and crossed their
t
's.
At 4:12
A.M.
, Koste said, “All right. Thank you, George. No further questions.” The longest murder confession in the history of New York State was complete. Koste had asked 594 questions. The transcript was sixty-one pages long. Whitmore was asked to sign it, and he did.