CHAPTER 5
By four-thirty in the afternoon, George Whitmore Jr. had confessed to having taken the subway to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and then transferred to an uptown train. Having taken some time to get this confession on paper, Bulger pushed forward, anxious to begin his line of questioning into the murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert. He asked George if maybe he had hit one of the girls on the head with a soda bottle, when entering the apartment. As an accident, Bulger reassured George, because the girl had startled him when he thought no one was home. Wasn’t that the case?
Whitmore waved his hands in the air and nodded his head back and forth.
“—Not because you wanted to hurt them George . . . ,” Bulger suggested promptly.
“I didn’t hit nobody with nothin’,” Whitmore answered defiantly, slinking back in his seat, his eyes shifting back up to the ceiling. Whitmore remained in this state for quite some time as DiPrima and Bulger revisited the line of questioning in a variety of different ways.
“You didn’t mean to hit anybody,” DiPrima tried; and then maybe “You forgot you hit her,” Bulger attempted weakly. Realizing that they’d backed George Whitmore Jr. into a corner, the two detectives decided to give him a break and left the room for a few minutes to regroup.
Whitmore, who by then seemed to understand why he was there, also appeared conflicted as to what to do. He looked down at his hands, wrists scratched from the handcuffs. He studied the dirt in his nails and spread his fingers out wide.
Whitmore saw the round doorknob turn, and his heart skipped a beat. Then he gazed up tiredly as DiPrima and Bulger reentered, along with two other gentlemen dressed in plainclothes. One man was introduced as Lieutenant Currie, commander of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, while the other was presented as Inspector William E. Coleman, the commander of the Thirteenth Detective District. DiPrima and Bulger took their usual seats across from Whitmore, and the two other men stood to the side, against the wall. Whitmore turned and grinned awkwardly at Lieutenant Currie and Inspector Coleman; they returned his greeting with similar, awkward smiles. Cigarettes were passed around, matches struck and the room became clouded with trailing smoke. A Lucky Strike was offered to Whitmore; once again he took it, accepting a light from Bulger, who advised him not to pay any attention to their new guests. Paper shuffled, chairs squeaked as bodies adjusted in their seats and the tubular light from above continued its erratic flickering. A moment later, Detective Bulger began speaking—this time in a casual, if pleasant, tone.
“Look, George—I just got off the phone with the girls and they say they’re not mad at you.”
Whitmore stared at Bulger blankly.
“You didn’t mean to do it. Right, Georgie? Isn’t that right?” he added eagerly.
“No, I didn’t . . . ,” Whitmore responded almost inaudibly. He had reached his hands up to his eyes, and the sound of the handcuffs clinking together overpowered his voice.
“What was that, George? Come at me again?”
Whitmore swallowed and repeated his statement.
“You didn’t what, George?”
DiPrima echoed Bulger’s query, leaning his elbows on the table. And in that moment, it seemed everyone in the room—from the shadowed men towering in the corners to the two detectives at the table—was bent over, mouths agape, breath paused and movement frozen.
“I didn’t mean to hurt those girls,” Whitmore managed finally, his voice a broken, stumbling mumble.
His eyes welled up. He fixed his gaze on DiPrima and then on Bulger, his voice coming through now—a faint, exhausted mess of syllables:
“Now . . . eh . . . can I pleeaase . . .”
He inhaled quickly—so quickly it sounded like a gasp. His nose was runny and he rubbed a finger along his nostrils and blinked erratically, as if his whole being had been shaken up.
“. . . go home?”
News of George Whitmore Jr.’s surprising and dramatic statement, “I didn’t mean to hurt those girls,” spread through the precinct like wildfire. And such startling testimony kept on coming. Shortly after 6:00 P.M., George Whitmore Jr. had confessed, wholly, to the attack of Alma Estrada, the murder of Minnie Edmonds, and the double homicide of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert. In the hours following his initial confession to Detective Edward Bulger, Manhattan detectives John Lynch and Andrew Dunleavy, of the Twenty-third Detective Squad, arrived at the Seventy-third, along with Assistant Chief Inspector Joseph Coyle. Both Lynch and Dunleavy, of the Twenty-third Precinct, were familiar with the facts and details of the Wylie-Hoffert case. Yet, the Brooklyn police brass and detectives denied them direct access to question George Whitmore. In fact, they were only permitted to write out a list of questions that they wanted Whitmore to answer. This growing antagonism between the Brooklyn and Manhattan detectives resulted in fetching Captain Frank Weldon, the Manhattan District detective commander who was in charge of the investigation from its inception, to act as a mediator between the opposing borough detectives.
By eleven in the evening, James J. Hosty, a Manhattan assistant district attorney (ADA), arrived at the Seventy-third Precinct. The Homicide Bureau of the Manhattan, New York County, District Attorney’s Office (DAO) had a procedure for its ADAs to be “on call”—the twenty-four-hour night chart—should a defendant in a homicide wish to make a statement. The process entailed the homicide detective assigned to the case to notify the ADA who was on call. The homicide detective then arranged for the ADA to be taken by squad car to the precinct where the defendant was being questioned. A young ADA, only in the DAO for three years, James Hosty happened to be the attorney on the chart and on call. After arriving at the precinct in Brooklyn, Kings County, he was advised by the Brooklyn Homicide Bureau detectives about all that had transpired, with particular detail regarding George Whitmore Jr.’s confession to the Wylie-Hoffert murders. Following this, and stretching deep into the early-morning hours of Saturday, April 25, Hosty took a Q&A statement from George Whitmore Jr., in the presence of Detectives Bulger and DiPrima and the New York County DAO stenographer Dennis Sheehan. Once again, and to everyone’s satisfaction, Whitmore described the bloody details of the night in question. George had now been under interrogation for well over seventeen hours, and it showed in his statements. At one point, when asked if he had any weapon on him during the night in question, he answered by saying, “Yes, I have it right there.”
Here and there, detectives would leave Whitmore in the interrogation room and revisit his statements. Finally, at approximately four in the morning, ADA James Hosty called his boss, Al Herman, the head of the Manhattan DAO’s Homicide Bureau, and reported the confession. He advised Herman that the consensus seemed clear that the blonde who appeared in the photo taken from Whitmore’s wallet was indeed Janice Wylie. Upon hearing this, Herman ordered that George Whitmore Jr., who had already been arrested by the Brooklyn detectives in the Minnie Edmonds and Alma Estrada cases, be booked for the murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert.
Early that morning of April 25, 1964, the street out front of the Seventy-third Precinct was packed with various officers and detectives, reporters, photographers and curious neighbors. Chief of Detectives Lawrence J. McKearney stood amid the mass of law enforcement and media and spoke confidently and proudly. As flashbulbs went off and a hum of whispers spread over the precinct steps, voices called out questions, each one drowning out the other—referring to the Wylie-Hoffert confession. McKearney said deliberately and clearly, “Whitmore told us details that only the killer could know.”
Later that morning, Whitmore was arraigned in Brooklyn’s criminal division courthouse for the Minnie Edmonds murder and the Alma Estrada attempted rape. Whitmore pleaded not guilty and was denied bail. The presiding magistrate effusively praised the outstanding work done by Brooklyn detectives. As Whitmore was led away to the Brooklyn lock-up detention area adjacent to the courtroom, he turned to his court-appointed lawyer, Harold Lasky, and said, with a puzzled expression, “Gee, I hope that the Brooklyn cops aren’t angry at me for lying to them about committing those crimes.”