Echoes of My Soul

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Delaney furrowed his brow. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “That’s good, because I believe in second chances, and I think that’s what you’ve got here.”

  Nodding, Delaney said, “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  When the Delaneys were gone, Lappin turned to Glass, who was standing next to him, and asked, “So where do we go from here, Mel?”

  Mel grinned and patted him on the shoulder. “Not to worry, I have a plan.”

  CHAPTER 13

  A little more than a week after the confrontation with Richard Robles, Mel Glass waited for the suspect in the office of Detective Nat Laurendi, a polygraph expert for the NYPD assigned to the DAO. It was midmorning, and it didn’t surprise him that Robles was late for his appointment with the lie detector. Glass thought it was just as likely that the young man wouldn’t show at all.

  Glass got his answer when Detective Paddy Lappin’s large body hurtled into the room. The big man’s face was red from exertion and his light blue eyes were bright with anger.

  “Robles’s dad just called me. Our guy OD’d last night,” Lappin snarled. “Some of his junkie friends found him unconscious. He’s in a coma at Metropolitan Hospital and might not make it!”

  Glass blinked once and stood up. “Let’s go,” he said, and headed out the door. “If we’re lucky, maybe we get a deathbed confession.”

  “We’ll take my car,” Lappin said as they got on the elevator.

  If Robles died now, they’d never learn the truth, nor have the satisfaction of bringing him to justice for the murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert. And George Whitmore would still be on the hook for crimes he didn’t commit. The Delaneys’ stories corroborated each other’s, but they were junkies with criminal records—facts a defense attorney was sure to exploit. He needed Richard Robles to corroborate them and implicate himself.

  As the elevator reached the ground floor, they walked quickly down Baxter Street, where Lappin had parked his unmarked squad car. Climbing in, Glass prayed, Please let him be alive when we get there....

  Lappin glanced over at Glass and knew what was going through the ADA’s mind. “Don’t worry,” he tried to assure his friend, “junkies don’t die at Metropolitan.”

  “I hope you’re right, Paddy,” Mel replied quietly as he turned to look out the side window.

  As Paddy Lappin sped down Grand Street, heading for First Avenue, Mel Glass noted that the once-brilliant foliage of the maples, oaks and elms in Sara D. Roosevelt Park appeared to be on its last legs. The month of October was drawing to an end, and the pedestrians, hurrying through the chill morning, pulled their coats around them and clutched hats to their heads.

  On a national level, it was a month that would be a snapshot of a rapidly changing America. During a trip to assess an escalating military “situation” in Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara declared that the United States would “stay as long as it takes” to defeat the Communists in the North. In Stockholm, Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, the FBI located the bodies of three missing civil rights workers, who had been on a mission to register disenfranchised blacks to vote, but were murdered, instead, by local law enforcement and members of the KKK.

  At Madison Square Garden, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a set of domestic social programs he called “the Great Society” whose purpose was to “eliminate poverty and racial injustice.” However, the big news in the five boroughs was that the Yankees had lost in the seventh game of the World Series to St. Louis, throwing the team’s legions of fans into a pin-striped funk. Mel Glass, an inveterate Phillies fan, was not among the mourners.

  Media interest in the “Career Girls Murders” had waned, despite the fact that Whitmore was slated for a November trial in Brooklyn for the Estrada attempted rape/assault. It seemed that with George’s arrest and indictment for the Wylie-Hoffert murders, the public and press were satisfied that the case was solved and life could go on, now that George “Brooklyn Psycho” Whitmore was safely off the streets.

  Only a very few people knew that was not true—that the killer was still out there among them.

  As Lappin turned left and sped north on First Avenue, heading for Metro Hospital on Ninety-seventh Street, Mel thought about what he’d learned since first meeting Richard Robles. After the confrontation between Robles and the Delaneys, Mel had tried to get a couple of hours’ sleep on one of the office couches. When others started arriving in the office for the day, he got up and talked to Homicide Bureau chief Al Herman again, asking to have the charges against Jimmy Delaney dropped. He then called and eventually got in touch with Detective David Downes.

  At the time of the murders in August 1963, Downes was assigned to the 107th Precinct in Queens. But as he recalled for Glass, in 1960 he’d been working out of the Two-Three for twelve years when he apprehended the then-sixteen-year-old Richard “Ricky” Robles, who was wanted for burglary and sexual assault.

  The kid was already a career criminal. “We figured he was good for maybe a hundred break-ins,” Downes told Glass.

  Robles had “the face of a choirboy,” but a violent temper. “We could never pin it on him, but we know he shot a pawnshop owner for trying to lowball him on a piece of expensive jewelry he was trying to hawk,” Downes shared with Glass.

  Nor was Robles the sort of burglar who liked to slip in and out of his victims’ homes or offices without leaving a trace, or even unnoticed. He seemed to enjoy ransacking apartments and destroying property he wasn’t taking with him, like the time he broke into a lawyer’s home and slashed the clothing he found in the man’s closet.

  Most of all, or so he’d told some of his criminal associates, he got a “kick” out of terrorizing the women he sometimes encountered—tying them up and threatening them with knives.

  “He’s said he enjoys watching their eyes as he terrorizes them,” Downes recalled.

  However, Robles wasn’t all just threats. When a woman he’d once surprised in her apartment was too slow removing a ring he demanded, he’d seized her hand and ripped it off her finger. He’d also sexually assaulted the woman—though he’d stopped short of raping her.

  There was another facet about the 1960 sexual assault/ burglary case that alerted Downes when he heard some of the details about the Wylie-Hoffert murders in the first week of September 1963.

  “In the 1960 case, Robles climbed in through a window at about eleven in the morning,” he recalled for Glass.

  Following his arrest by Downes, Robles had been convicted and sentenced to five years in the Elmira Reformatory. However, when the Wylie-Hoffert case went down three years later, the detective had no idea where the violent young burglar was—in or out of Elmira. When Downes talked to his commander, Lieutenant Ray Jones, about his suspicions, Jones suggested that he check to see if Robles was on the streets. If Robles was, Downes should call the detective squad at the Two-Three with his tip.

  Sure enough, Downes learned that Robles had been released from Elmira in June 1963, having been let go early “for good behavior.” The detective immediately notified the Two-Three detectives who were working Wylie-Hoffert. He told them he thought they ought to look at Robles for several reasons: Robles was known for working that area of the Upper East Side; he entered apartments during the day by climbing into open windows; he had a penchant for violence and sexual assault, in addition to burglary. In response to Downes’s tip, two parole officers were sent out to find Robles and bring him into the Twenty-third Precinct.

  As it turned out, the detectives who questioned Robles were John Lynch and Marty Zinkand. When they asked Robles where he’d been on the morning of August 28, the teen at first said he couldn’t remember. But under continued questioning, he suddenly recalled that he’d been mopping and sweeping the apartment building where his mother was the manager. The detectives immediately tried to contact Robles’s mother, but she wasn’t in. Several days later, when they did reach her—and after the suspect had
time to talk to her—she backed up her son’s story.

  In hindsight Ricky Robles stood out as a prime suspect. But at the time, he’d been just one of hundreds of potential suspects—burglars, rapists, murderers—pulled in by the police for questioning, many of them with no better alibis than the teenager. As such, the DD5 report from Lynch and Zinkand had gone into the task force files like all the others.

  After talking to Detective Downes, Glass had tried to find out as much as he could about Robles. He’d talked to the parole office and counselors at Elmira, and the detectives had hit the streets, interviewing Robles’s friends and colleagues in crime. The picture that emerged was much more in line with the profile Glass’s psychologist sister, Blanche, had painted of the killer.

  The seeds for Richard Robles’s anger and his drug addiction had been planted in childhood and nurtured through his early teens. He’d grown up in the Yorkville area of Manhattan, which was poor, crime-ridden and violent. Although still technically the Upper East Side, Yorkville was a much different and much harsher environment than the more affluent areas he would later victimize. His father had been a heavy drinker and abusive, while his mother openly carried on an affair with the husband of a woman named Dolly Ruiz, the aunt of one Margie Delaney. Perhaps out of revenge, Dolly began having sex with Ricky, who was only fifteen at the time, already a heroin addict and fifteen years her junior. Almost two years later, they had a daughter together; but before the child’s first birthday, Robles had been sent off to Elmira.

  Of the street people the detectives talked to, one in particular interested Mel Glass. He was an old small-time crook named Leo Wallace, who like Fagin in Oliver Twist claimed to have taught Robles the art of being a cat burglar. His specialty had been the “daytime stepover”—using a ledge or windowsill to reach over to climb in through open windows at times when the apartment dwellers were likely to be at work.

  However, Robles apparently wasn’t too worried about the residents, particularly if they were young females.

  “Wallace once saw him on East Seventy-seventh and Park Avenue waiting to hit an apartment,” Lynch reported to Glass. “Wallace asked him why he wasn’t going in, and Robles said he was—and I quote—‘waiting for the chick to come back to the apartment’ first.”

  Hearing about Wallace’s comments, Glass thought about what Downes had said regarding Robles’s entering apartments through windows during daylight hours, and Lynch’s report from the crime scene of seeing the kitchen window open. One of the big questions regarding Whitmore’s confession was that he said—with Detective Bulger’s prompting—that he entered the service stairwell leading to the apartment through the door in the lobby. But Glass had gone over to the building himself and established that the door in the lobby leading to the service stairwell always clicked and locked shut, and could only be opened from the stairwell side. Yet, according to Bulger, Whitmore had somehow managed to open a locked door, bearing no sign, and leading to God knows where, all the while slipping past the doorman. It seemed questionable.

  Occam’s razor again, Glass thought, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

  As the Whitmore case unraveled, Mel Glass tried to warn the Brooklyn DA and Brooklyn cops about the real possibility that the Whitmore confessions in the Estrada and Edmonds cases were likely suspect. Since the confession in Wylie-Hoffert was worthless, Glass advised that Brooklyn better be able to corroborate with independent evidence everything that George Whitmore Jr. had to say.

  The Brooklyn response had been that if the New York DAO wanted to “chase rainbows,” that was Hogan’s business. They had an airtight case that included a positive identification of Whitmore by Estrada, and a solid confession that would hold up in court. The prosecution of George Whitmore Jr. was going forward, beginning with the Estrada case in the first week of November ’64 to be followed by the Edmonds murder case in the spring of ’65.

  In New York County, Hogan wasn’t ready to drop the charges against George Whitmore Jr. and indict Richard Robles. There were several issues that needed to be resolved first. It wasn’t enough that the New York DAO was convinced that Whitmore was innocent of the Wylie-Hoffert murders, they were going to have to do everything in their power to prove it. After all, a Manhattan grand jury, based on the evidence presented to it, handed down an indictment. Certainly, that fact was bound to be used against them by Robles’s defense attorney, who’d label the People’s case “a fishing expedition” and argue that when the DAO came to the conclusion that it could not convict Whitmore, it had to find another patsy and did so in the poor, young Richard Robles.

  So part of Glass’s challenge was to be able to thwart that attack by essentially destroying the DAO’s own initial case against George Whitmore Jr. Exposing the photograph as a fraud was dynamite, but Glass and his detectives had not stopped there.

  Ever since their first meeting, Glass had stayed in contact with Whitmore’s mom, Bernadine. Through her, the detectives had found Ludie Montgomery, who fondly recalled her friendship with George. She said that during August ’63, they’d met in Wildwood in the Ivy Hotel lobby, where he used to hang out to watch the famous musicians who stayed and performed there. It wasn’t much of a romance; after all, she was only fifteen. Their dates mostly consisted of innocently sipping sodas together in the lobby, people-watching and staring at a small black-and-white television in the corner.

  Then Ludie dropped her bombshell. She didn’t think George could have committed the murders, because she’d met him in the lobby at seven-thirty in the evening of August 28. She was positive of the time and date because they’d watched a television newscast of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech.

  Ludie recalled that her friend was excited by what he’d heard in King’s speech, though he’d admitted that he didn’t understand all of what the civil rights leader was talking about. But, otherwise, he didn’t seem agitated or frightened, as one might expect of a double murderer, nor did he mention going to New York City that day.

  The young woman’s story was confirmed by her mother, Jenny Montgomery, who in a separate interview said she’d also seen Whitmore sitting with her daughter in the lobby the night of King’s speech. Further investigation turned up Larry Wilson, a seventeen-year-old student at Wildwood High and a dishwasher at the Ivy, who’d drifted out to the lobby to listen to King and saw Whitmore.

  It wasn’t an airtight alibi. George Whitmore could have been in New York on the morning of August 28, murdered two women, made his way back to Wildwood, traveling over 130 miles in several hours, arriving that evening in time for the news. But it was not the simplest or the correct explanation, Glass knew.

  By mid-October, Mel Glass had essentially everything the prosecution would need to demonstrate to a jury why the DAO had decided upon further investigation that George Whitmore Jr. was not the killer. Still, given the unique circumstances of the case, he didn’t want to tip his hand by dismissing the indictment against Whitmore.

  While committed to the ideal that the unjustly accused must be exonerated, Glass knew that an immediate dismissal of the indictment would not free Whitmore. The Kings County, Brooklyn, DAO had Whitmore remanded—no bail—on the Edmonds murder and Estrada attempted rape/assault cases.

  More important, Glass wanted to build the case against the killer. He believed that as long as Whitmore was still the indicted defendant, Richard Robles might slip up. And they needed him to slip up; right now it was Robles’s word against the Delaneys’ .

  That was the inducing cause for Glass to put his plan into action after he interviewed the Delaneys. He’d asked Jimmy and Margie to continue trying to get Robles to talk about the murder. Hopefully, Robles would drop some more evidentiary nuggets that would further implicate him.

  What he didn’t tell the Delaneys was that he’d persuaded Hogan to sign off on court-ordered “bugging” of their apartment, without their knowledge. With the cooperation of the New York Fire Department (FDNY), the D
elaney apartment building was evacuated under the ruse that a fire had been reported. As tenants of the dingy brick five-story walk-up filed out onto the street, a contingent of firefighters and DAO wiremen rushed in. As the firefighters made a show of looking for a fire, which didn’t exist, the DAO technicians planted a microphone on a top shelf of the living-room closet. Meanwhile, a listening post was set up in an apartment a block away.

  In the few weeks that followed, the Delaneys had tried several times to get Robles to incriminate himself by talking about the Wylie-Hoffert case. Most of the time, Robles danced around their questions or made innocuous statements, which did little to build the case against him. Occasionally he said things that could be interpreted as incriminating, but even then the recordings were of such poor quality that they would be of questionable value in a courtroom.

  Paddy Lappin finally pulled the sedan up to the curb in front of Metropolitan Hospital. Both men entered and made their way to Ward 7A. There they were informed by the attending physician that Richard Robles was admitted at nine-thirty in the evening, the night before. He was brought in by ambulance, unconscious and in a coma from an overdose of drugs.

  “He’s in and out of it,” the doctor said. “But even when he’s awake, he’s not very lucid, so I don’t know what you’re going to get out of him.”

  As the doctor walked away, Lappin nudged Glass. “Maybe I should dress up like the Devil and go to his room,” he said with a grin. “Then when he wakes up, tell him he’s going to hell unless he confesses.”

  Mel laughed. “It might work,” he replied. “But I think he’s going to hell, no matter what he says.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Paddy Lappin was right about junkies not dying at Metropolitan Hospital, at least not in this case. In fact, just a few days later, Richard Robles was sitting up in bed and alert when Detective David Downes dropped by his hospital room.