CHAPTER 18
“He showed up at my pad a little before noon and said he was in trouble—that he’d just killed two girls.”
As he testified from the witness stand, Nathan “Jimmy” Delaney scratched the stubble on his chin and tugged at the unaccustomed tie around his neck. He glanced over at the defense table, where Richard Robles sat impassively staring back at him.
Delaney shook his head—whether that was out of sorrow or disgust, it was impossible to tell. The defendant, however, showed no emotion as he turned to look at the jurors.
Watching the exchange between the two former friends, Glass recalled the evening just slightly more than a year before when he first heard the Delaneys talk about the morning a bloodstained Ricky Robles came to their apartment. That had been followed by the confrontation in his office between the couple and the defendant. All of it set into motion a chain of events that culminated in Delaney’s appearance on the witness stand.
Prior to Jimmy Delaney taking the stand that day, Detective John Lynch had been called to describe what he saw and what he did when he arrived the evening of August 28, 1963, at apartment 3C. As he walked the jurors through the apartment and into the bloodstained bedroom, the detective answered several seemingly innocuous questions from John Keenan, though Glass knew they were anything but throwaways.
Keenan made sure that the witness described the kitchen in detail: the open window, the open door “with no sign of forced entry,” the open drawer beneath the counter that contained forks, spoons and knives, the six-pack Pepsi container, with two bottles missing, the absence of a kitchen table. Similar attention was paid to the detective’s recollection of the stairwell door that opened into the lobby: that there was no sign on the lobby side denoting where the door led, or if it was an exit; that it shut and locked itself automatically; and once shut, it could only be opened without a key from the stairwell side.
“It couldn’t be opened from the lobby,” the detective added.
As Lynch discussed the condition of the murder room and the victims, Keenan asked him about the bloody eyeglasses on the bed and a jar of Noxzema lying on the ground. Then he inquired whether Lynch had seen a clock radio.
“Yes,” the detective replied, “it was stopped at ten thirty-seven A.M.”
When Lynch remarked that he’d seen a razor blade on the floor of the death room, Keenan asked him to describe the blade.
“It had arrows stamped on the side, indicating it came from a dispenser,” Lynch replied.
“Did you see a paper wrapper for a razor blade on the bathroom floor?”
Lynch frowned and shook his head. “No, there was no paper wrapper. Again, the blade was the sort you get out of a dispenser, not a wrapper.”
Under cross-examination Mack Dollinger questioned Detective Lynch about taking the photograph that was found on George Whitmore Jr. to Max Wylie and others in the early-morning hours after Whitmore’s arrest. The detective agreed that Wylie denied the blonde in the photograph was Janice, and that he’d informed Captain Frank Weldon and Detective Edward Bulger of that fact.
As Glass listened, he knew this was the first glimpse into the defense scheme: The police knew right away that Whitmore had lied about the photograph. They couldn’t convict him, so they had to set up the defendant as a stand-in.
Glass shook his head in disgust, knowing what was to come, because he had informed Mack Dollinger about the lack of identification on the photograph.
When Detective Lynch stepped down, Keenan continued by calling associate medical examiner (ME) Dr. Bela Dur and the renowned chief ME, Dr. Milton Helpern. One at a time, they testified regarding the cause of death of each of the girls, describing in explicit detail the number and type of wounds.
Lost, perhaps, in the horrific account of the autopsies were two notations that Helpern, a white-haired grandfatherly type, made about Janice Wylie. In one observation he stated that Noxzema had been smeared on Janice’s genital and anal areas. In the other notation, he said that when the young woman was disemboweled, the killer had punctured her intestines three times, releasing digestive gases that would have caused a foul odor.
Glass watched the jurors’ faces grimace at the chief medical examiner’s remark, maybe wondering if such disturbing minutia was really necessary. But he knew when Jimmy Delaney was called to the stand that the stage was set. Every issue he and Keenan had discussed in their strategy sessions, every witness, diagram and photograph—no matter how ostensibly mundane—brought before the jury were metaphorically tiles in a mosaic. Each one was not of immediate evidentiary impact; but when put together in a finished picture, they would point inexorably to the defendant’s guilt.
However, that was not readily apparent when thirty-six-year-old Jimmy Delaney began his testimony by answering questions about his personal background. Although he’d been a U.S. Marine, the witness admitted he’d been addicted to heroin since 1954 and had a long criminal history, which began in 1948 with a conviction for attempted robbery. Most of his other convictions were for minor drug possession and sales, but he’d spent most of his adult life in and out of jails and prisons, including thirty months in a federal penitentiary for the sale of narcotics.
With the biographic account out of the way, the real questioning began: “Could you tell the jury, please, if you saw the defendant on August 28, 1963?” Keenan asked.
“Yeah,” Delaney answered, turning to look at Robles. “He showed up at my pad a little before noon and said he was in trouble—that he’d just killed two girls.”
At first, Delaney testified, he was worried that Robles might have led the police to his apartment. His friend assured him, however, that he’d taken precautions. After fleeing from the murder scene, Robles said he’d taken a taxi downtown, got out, walked some distance and then caught another taxi back uptown to the West Side, and then another cab cross town to Delaney’s apartment. All of this just in case the first taxi driver recalled picking up a possible suspect near the scene of a double murder.
Robles was carrying a paper bag when he arrived at the apartment. It contained a green sports shirt with blood on it and a pair of pink rubber gloves. He also had a bloodstain on his left pant leg. More blood had soaked through to the white T-shirt he was wearing beneath a jacket, the killer said, he had gotten from his victims’ apartment.
“He wanted a change of clothing, so I gave him pants and a shirt,” Delaney told the jurors.
The defendant had also wanted heroin and handed over some cash that he claimed he got from the purse of one of the victims. Leaving his wife behind with Robles, the witness said, he was gone about forty-five minutes before returning with the drugs.
When he got back to the apartment, Robles and his wife were talking about the murders. “He said he made one of them give him a blow job.”
The three addicts shot up the heroin, after which the defendant left the apartment. But he’d returned about ten that night with the clothes he’d borrowed and a newspaper that already had a story about the murder of the two young women who’d been stabbed to death in their Upper East Side apartment. “He said those were the girls he’d been talking about.”
The defendant returned again the next day with more newspapers, which now had photographs of the victims. “I asked why he had to kill the girls.... One was pretty attractive. He told me that she wasn’t as attractive as the newspaper made her out to be.”
“Did he tell you how he got into the apartment?” Keenan asked.
“Yeah, he said he got in through the kitchen window,” Delaney answered. “He went out a stairwell window and stepped on a vent so he could reach the windowsill and pulled himself up.”
At the prosecution table, Glass glanced at the jurors to see how they’d reacted to the answer. He could almost sense their minds collectively recognizing the mosaic falling together: recalling the photographs of the back of the building, Detective Lynch’s description of the open kitchen window and Kate Fagen’s testimony that she double-locked the service door after she took out the garbage.
John Keenan’s examination of the witness wore into the late afternoon and then into the next morning. Delaney testified that Richard Robles told him that as he was sexually assaulting the blonde, the girl with the thick glasses came in. “He told her to take them off, but she wouldn’t. She said she wanted to be able to identify him.”
The jurors listened raptly as the witness recalled Robles’s description of his actions after he decided that the women had to die: striking them on the head with the Pepsi bottles, the frenzy of slashing and stabbing that followed.
“One of the girls took a long time to die. He said he had to stab her several times up through her stomach to get to her heart.”
Glass knew there wasn’t a juror who wasn’t thinking of Dr. Helpern’s testimony regarding the odor emitted when Delaney added, “Robles said the smell was awful—so bad he almost threw up.”
Covered with blood and gore, the killer had then gone into the bathroom, where he took a shower and cleaned the knife, which he left on the sink, Delaney testified Robles had told him and Margie.
As the defense would have certainly raised the issue if Keenan had not, the prosecutor asked what had brought Delaney to the attention of the police in the Wylie-Hoffert murders.
“I killed a drug pusher named Cruz,” Delaney admitted. “It was self-defense. He hit me with a steel rod.”