CHAPTER 21
The young black man with the acne-scarred face stared sullenly down at the defense attorney, who was approaching the witness stand like a lion stalking an antelope. Mack Dollinger obviously believed that George Whitmore Jr. would crumble under questioning, as he had with the Brooklyn detectives.
Despite the judge’s admonition to the jury that Whitmore wasn’t on trial in this case, that hoped-for misperception was essentially a large part of Dollinger’s strategy. If he could make a case to the jury that Whitmore was the real killer or, barring that, show that he was at least as good a suspect as Robles, the defense attorney might sow enough doubt to win an acquittal. However, the witness, dressed in a gray jail jumpsuit, was getting to be an old hand at testifying. He had grown tired of being pushed around.
Whitmore was now twenty-one. As he’d told the press, which had gone from labeling him the “Brooklyn Psycho” to championing his cause, he was living a nightmare that seemed to have no end—especially as he was still under indictment for the Edmonds and Estrada cases in Brooklyn.
The first witness called by the defense had been Liam Gynt, who’d been working as the doorman at the 57 East Eighty-eighth residence on the day of the murders. The thirty-seven-year-old was married, with five kids, but he was a “real lush” in Mel Glass’s opinion. Gynt’s memory and judgment had been clouded by alcohol.
In fact, the defense owed it to Glass that the doorman was even present in the courtroom. First, during the course of the investigation, Glass had interviewed Gynt, who gave conflicting versions on what he saw and heard that day. So Glass turned him and the questionable information over to the defense.
Thereafter, the defense advised Glass that they wanted to speak to Gynt and possibly call him as a witness at trial. When Glass called him before the trial and told him about the defense’s intentions, Gynt, who was a merchant marine, gave the impression that he was going to “ship out” before he could be served with a subpoena. So Glass called Dollinger’s office and said that if they wanted Gynt, they had better serve him immediately.
On the witness stand, Gynt recounted how he’d delivered a package to apartment 3C from Bloomingdale’s and was met at the door by the then-unmarried Kate Olsen. Charged with picking up the garbage twice a day from the stairwell landings, he said that when he picked up the garbage between ten and eleven that morning, he hadn’t heard anything from apartment 3C. However, when he returned at about three in the afternoon, and was, in fact, in the hall across from 3C, he heard someone moving around in the apartment and the sound of water running. He also testified that he’d seen the service stairwell door ajar at the same time.
After getting off work at four o’clock, Gynt said, he’d gone around the corner to a bar, where he drank until about ten that night. When he went home, he learned that the police wanted to talk to him.
Of course, Mack Dollinger’s point in putting Gynt on the stand was the witness claiming to have heard someone in the apartment—presumably the “real” killer—running the water in the afternoon. The Delaneys, however, had testified that Robles arrived at their apartment before noon, claiming that’s when he confessed to killing two women in the morning.
When Glass and Keenan discussed Gynt’s potential testimony the night before, they didn’t think that Liam Gynt was purposefully trying to throw water on the prosecution case against Robles. However, given that Glass and Keenan felt Gynt was an unreliable witness—and that two years had passed—they believed he may have “compressed time” and had mixed up what he saw, heard and when.
On cross-examination Keenan asked, “Don’t you remember telling Mr. Glass that the door to 3C was closed in the afternoon?”
“Then I made a mistake,” Gynt said. “’Cause I know the door, like I say, was ajar. It wasn’t locked. In other words, you could have pushed the door in and walked right in.”
“Mr. Gynt, isn’t it a fact that you told Detective Zinkand the next day, August 29 of 1963, that the kitchen door was closed about three o’clock when you were picking up the garbage?”
Gynt furrowed his brow. “Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember.”
After Liam Gynt stepped down, Mack Dollinger called George Whitmore Jr. to the stand. As he took a seat, Whitmore glanced briefly over at his mother, who sat in the seat behind the prosecution table.
Glass had turned to follow the witness’s look. His gaze met that of Bernadine Whitmore, who gave him a slight smile and a nod. Her son was still a prisoner, but she knew that Mel Glass and the New York DAO, which had formally dismissed the indictment against George, had done what they could to correct an injustice. She had called Mel shortly before the Robles trial to thank him for his efforts.
“You told me you would find the truth,” she said. “And you lived up to your promise.”
While on the stand, Whitmore was wearing a pair of thick, black-rimmed eyeglasses, which he needed to see the documents that Mack Dollinger gave to him, one at a time, as he started his questioning. The first documents were Detective Edward Bulger’s notes from his interrogation.
Looking carefully over the pages, Whitmore then handed them back, saying the signature on the pages wasn’t his. Presented next with a diagram of the East Eighty-eighth Street apartment, Whitmore also denied drawing it, as Bulger had claimed. It was an important point, as the alleged suspect’s “knowledge” of the apartment layout was one of Bulger’s contentions that proved Whitmore had been there. But now the witness said all he had done was place marks on the diagram, which had already been drawn, under the guidance of the detectives in the room.
When Dollinger tried to get him to admit that he’d confessed to going to the East Eighty-eighth Street apartment, Whitmore said it was a lie. He’d been at his parents’ house in Wildwood on the morning of August 28, 1963; and then in the afternoon, he’d walked to the Ivy Hotel, where he later met Ludie Montgomery.
If Mack Dollinger thought he was going to be able to cow George Whitmore Jr. as the detectives had, he was mistaken. Whitmore repeatedly denied being in the apartment or murdering two young women—no matter how many times the defense lawyer asked, or rephrased, the question. He said everything he’d confessed to in Brooklyn had been suggested to him by the police.
“I told them I wasn’t in the building,” he testified. “But they insisted that when I went into the building and pushed open the door, the first thing I was supposed to have saw was soda bottles. Everything was suggested to me this way.”
Sometimes he made up answers he thought the detectives wanted to hear, Whitmore said, and made sense according to the story they fed him. An example was when he told the detectives that after the killings, he’d traveled back to his uncle’s house in Brooklyn, where he found the older man sitting on the doorstep and asked him for a dollar to buy a hot dog.
Finally, unable to get Whitmore to budge on his denials, Dollinger turned him over to Keenan for cross-examination.
The prosecutor started by getting George Whitmore Jr. to discuss his impoverished background and that he had been eighteen years old when he completed the eighth grade and then dropped out of school.
Under John Keenan’s questioning, Whitmore noted that he didn’t have his eyeglasses—they’d been lost—when he was arrested in Brooklyn. Nearly blind without them, he’d been unable to read any notes or clearly see the diagram. They’d asked him a lot of questions about a photograph he’d been carrying in his wallet, but they wouldn’t believe him when he told them where he got it.
“I told the police that I got the photograph while I was at the dump,” he testified. “One of the detectives told me that this picture looked like a girl they knew. They insisted that I got this picture from an apartment on Eighty-eighth Street. I told them the picture did not come from Eighty-eighth Street and that I never been there.”
“So the detectives kept telling you that it came from an apartment on Eighty-eighth Street?” Keenan repeated for emphasis.
“Yes, sir. But I never been to Eighty-eighth Street in my life.”
Keenan used the moment to ask Whitmore if he could describe how to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan. When they were discussing trial strategy, Glass had told him about his meeting with Bernadine Whitmore, who’d said her son would have no idea how to get around in New York City.
On the witness stand, Whitmore furrowed his brow as though trying his best to see if he could correctly answer the prosecutor’s question. But then he gave up and shook his head. “I don’t know, sir,” he replied. “I never been out that way by myself.”
Keenan then asked if the Brooklyn detectives had said anything to him about the girls he was alleged to have attacked in the East Eighty-eighth Street apartment.
“One of the detectives came in and told me that he had called the girls up and they were all right,” Whitmore answered. “One of the detectives said I was supposed to have cut the girls and they went to a hospital, but they were all right. The other detective left the room and was gone maybe five or ten minutes. When he came back, he said he’d spoke to the girls a couple of minutes ago and they was all right.”
Keenan next introduced People’s Exhibit 72, the photograph of Abbe Mills and Jennifer Holley at Belleplain State Forest. Whitmore readily identified it as the photograph he picked up in the dump. He said Louise Orr was a family friend who sometimes came over to his parents’ house for dinner. Blushing, he admitted that he’d written the dedication, To George From Louise, on the back of the photograph because he wanted his friends to believe that one of the young women in the photograph was his girlfriend.
As the young man waited for the next question, Mel Glass wondered if George Whitmore Jr. truly understood how much trouble picking up a discarded photograph had cost him, as well as the difficulty it presented to the prosecution of the defendant, Robles. Without it, Detective Edward Bulger would have never questioned him for the Wylie-Hoffert murders.
Then again, if Glass had not pursued locating the young women in the photograph—proving that George’s confession to the murders was false—there may have been no reason to question whether his confessions to Edmonds and Estrada were also not true. Glass found it terribly ironic that this one piece of crucial evidence—the photograph, People’s Exhibit 72, which had been used to implicate Whitmore initially, because Bulger believed it depicted Janice Wylie—was now the same piece of evidence that exonerated him.
Also, if Glass had not spoken to Bernadine Whitmore, there would have been no alibi witnesses for George Whitmore Jr.
“Mr. Whitmore, do you know a young lady by the name of Ludie Montgomery?” Keenan asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“And did you see her at all on August 28, 1963?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When did you see her, and where did you see her?”
“This was when I went to the bar, to the Ivy Hotel, to the barroom.”
“Were you with her that day?”
“Yes.”
At last, George Whitmore Jr. was excused as a witness. As the young man walked between the prosecution and defense tables, heading back to his prison cell, Mel Glass recalled an article that had appeared over the summer in the New York Journal-American. Incidentally, this was the same publication that had praised the Brooklyn detectives and had given Bulger its public service award.
In a published interview with Whitmore, the prisoner had reflected on the long interrogation that had led to his arrest: “I kept saying to myself: When is it all going to end? Why don’t they leave me alone? And when they tell me how I was supposed to have done these things, I felt like dirt. I felt so low. In my mind, I kept calling on God, but it seemed like He didn’t hear me.”