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.”
CHAPTER 22
As the trial of Ricky Robles entered the fourth week of testimony, it was becoming increasingly clear to knowledgeable spectators how unique the proceedings were in the annals of the New York DAO. Here was a prosecution team having to admit that their vaunted Homicide Bureau had made a grievous mistake in indicting George Whitmore Jr., and then ask the jurors to look at the evidence and believe that the prosecutors now had the right man, Richard Robles. And here was the defense out to show that Robles was no better a suspect than Whitmore had been and, in a strange twist, that the New York DAO didn’t make mistakes.
Perhaps the most singular irony was the role reversal between the two sides when Mack Dollinger began calling to the stand the Brooklyn detectives and brass involved in the interrogation and arrest of George Whitmore Jr. Now it was the defense attorney’s mission to convince the jury of the professionalism, dedication and abilities of men he traditionally would have been at odds with in a trial. On the other hand, it was John Keenan’s quest, however reluctantly, to destroy the Brooklyn cops’ credibility, competency and, in a couple of instances, call into question their integrity.
The fact that the Brooklyn detectives, particularly Joseph DiPrima and Edward Bulger, had forced the “strange bedfellows” scenario angered and saddened Mel Glass. As Frank Hogan had noted back in January when discussing the ramifications of indicting Robles and dismissing the case against Whitmore, the effects of the mistake on the justice system might be felt for years. He had predicted that in future cases in which the prosecution relied in part or whole on a confession, it would be commonplace for defense attorneys to point to George Whitmore Jr. and argue to juries that if the police could manufacture a false confession in one case, they could manufacture them in all. And that even such a renowned DAO as New York’s sometimes indicted innocent people.
Also, by its nature, the trial threatened to create a
rift between the DAO and the NYPD, which in normal circumstances were natural allies in the fight to protect citizens, get criminals off the streets and administer justice. But now, John Keenan had to demonstrate to the jury that Brooklyn detectives had not just been sloppy. Rather, they had lied and cheated to frame an innocent man—a position that would be repeated in the newspapers, as well as around the coffeepot in squad rooms. The detectives who’d worked with Mel Glass knew and respected the way he’d gone about his investigation—and that he was right about George Whitmore Jr. and Richard Robles. But the NYPD had thousands of officers, detectives and brass—many of whom didn’t know the truth or want to believe that their fellow officers would have framed an innocent person.
That night before, Glass and Keenan had talked about how to avoid painting all members of the NYPD with the same broad brush. Keenan would need to tread lightly while separating cops’ natural inclination to protect their own from what they knew, in this case, to be right. It would mean asking them to cross the thin blue line to tell the truth—and even under oath, some would, and some wouldn’t.
The effort began with Mack Dollinger’s first police witness, Deputy Chief Inspector Edward Carey, assigned to the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad at the time of Whitmore’s arrest, but now retired. Carey told the jury that he’d been present during some of the interrogation and that Whitmore appeared relaxed and was answering questions voluntarily.
On cross-examination Keenan showed Carey the photograph of Abbe Mills and Jennifer Holley, People’s Exhibit 72, and asked if Detective Bulger had told him he thought the blonde was Janice Wylie.
“We were trying to ID who the girl was,” Carey said; then he shrugged. “No one said it was the Wylie girl, because no one knew the Wylie girl.”
Keenan wasn’t buying it. “Did Bulger tell you that one of the women in the photograph strongly resembled the Wylie girl?”
“He said she was blonde. . . .”
Moving toward the witness, Keenan deliberately and forcefully asked again, “Did Bulger tell you that one of the women in the photograph strongly resembled the Wylie girl?”
Challenged, Carey thought about it for a moment and nervously licked his lips. Then he nodded. “That’s right. He did.”
As Deputy Chief Inspector Carey was excused, Mack Dollinger rose and announced, “The defense calls Joseph DiPrima.”
The barrel-chested detective walked into the courtroom a moment later and looked over the people waiting there as if scanning the crowd for a suspect. When his gaze reached Mel Glass, DiPrima’s eyes hardened briefly before he composed himself and strode purposefully to the witness stand to be sworn in.
Another quick glare from the detective as he took his seat reminded Glass of their “whose team are you on” confrontation at the Edmonds trial in April. But the detective’s square-jawed face was impassive beneath his salt-and-pepper crew cut as he faced the jury and waited for Dollinger to ask his first question.
Glass wondered if the detective felt compromised as a defense witness after twenty-eight years with the NYPD and currently a detective first grade.
“The highest level of detective—is that right?” Dollinger asked effusively.
“Yes,” DiPrima answered without emotion.
After establishing the detective’s credentials, Dollinger had him describe the events regarding George Whitmore Jr. from the point when Detective Edward Bulger had poked his head in the door and asked if he could question the suspect. DiPrima gave a general chronology of the interrogation process. He emphatically testified that Whitmore had not been intimidated into making his statements and that he’d not been fed details of the crime. And, yes, Whitmore had willingly signed the statement written out for him by Bulger.
“Did you or anyone else suggest to Mr. Whitmore that Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were okay, still alive?” Dollinger asked.
“I never told George Whitmore the girls were still alive,” the detective replied tersely. “And I never heard anyone else say that, too.”
Walked right into it, Glass thought as Keenan rose to cross-examine the witness.
Striding right up to the jury box, John Keenan placed a transcript with several pages of notes on the ledge that protruded from the box. He turned and addressed the detective. “Didn’t you tell Assistant DA James Hosty, when he arrived at the Seventy-third Precinct, that as far as George Whitmore knew, the girls were still alive? Didn’t you tell that to Hosty?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” DiPrima admitted with a frown.
Keenan was a master chess player in the courtroom and believed it was essential to establish basic fundamental truths as a foundation before moving to checkmate.
“Detective Bulger told you that one of the girls in the photo looked like Janice Wylie. Is that correct?” he asked.
“Yeah,” DiPrima conceded, “and I believed him, because he’d been assigned to the Wylie-Hoffert case.”
Keenan swiftly changed tactics and moved quickly toward checkmate. “Did you tell Mel Glass in the summer of 1964 that you’d been in the building at 57 East Eighty-eighth Street prior to April 24, 1964, when George Whitmore was arrested? That you’d visited a doctor’s office there two or three times?”
DiPrima shot another hard glance at Glass before answering, “Yeah.”
“And did you tell Mr. Glass that your doctor told you about the Wylie-Hoffert murders that happened in that building?”
“Yeah, he said that two girls were killed in the building.”
“So you knew that the girls were killed in the building at 57 East Eighty-eighth Street before,” Keenan emphasized and repeated, “before George Whitmore was questioned on April 24, 1964?”
DiPrima scowled. “Yeah, I knew it.”
“Didn’t you testify in Supreme Court in Kings County, Brooklyn, on March sixth of this year, that you had no idea that Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were murdered in an apartment on East Eighty-eighth Street in Manhattan?”
DiPrima suddenly had the look of a man who realized he’d walked into quicksand with no apparent way out. “I don’t remember,” he muttered.
Expecting the evasive prevarication, Keenan produced from his papers on the jury box ledge a New York State trial transcript from the Brooklyn proceedings he’d just mentioned. He asked the court to take judicial notice of the official certified copy and enter it into evidence. Judge Davidson so ruled without objection.
With the court’s permission, Keenan then handed one set of the pages to DiPrima and kept another for himself. He had already provided the defense with its copy. “Detective, this is from your sworn testimony starting at page seven hundred twenty-eight of the trial transcript. I’ll read the questions and you read how you answered for the jury, please.”
DiPrima swallowed hard, but he didn’t reply.
Keenan began. “ ‘Question—Did George Whitmore mention to you the Eighty-eighth Street apartment and that he got the picture from there before you mentioned anything to him about an Eighty-eighth Street apartment?’ ”
The detective cleared his throat. “ ‘Answer—I had no idea about . . .’ ” DiPrima hesitated, understanding now just how fast he was sinking into the bottomless pit.
“Please continue,” Keenan insisted.
“‘Answer—I had no idea about an Eighty-eighth Street apartment.’ ”
“ ‘Question—You had no idea about an Eighty-eighth Street apartment?’ ”
“ ‘Answer—That’s right.’ ”
“ ‘Question—Didn’t you know that was where the girls were killed?’ ”
“ ‘Answer—I didn’t even know the address or place. I knew they were killed in Manhattan.’ ”
Keenan looked up from the transcript and fixed his eyes on DiPrima. “But you did know where the girls were killed when you were questioning George Whitmore, didn’t you?” he demanded.
DiPrima let out a heavy sigh. “I knew they were killed in Manhattan.” He blinked hard and then finished by saying, “And I knew they
were killed on Eighty-eighth Street. Yes, sir.”
Keenan bore in on the witness as he moved slowly toward him. Now just a few feet separating him from the witness, he shot out, “And you knew that when you were questioning George Whitmore?”
“Yes.”
“And yet, you testified under oath, ‘I didn’t even know the address or the place.’ You did testify that way?”
“Yes, sir.”
The jury was riveted by the confrontation; and after DiPrima’s admission, the jurors focused on Keenan. Exposed as a cop who had lied under oath, DiPrima’s face blushed red. He kept his eyes on the prosecutor, as if he couldn’t face the jurors any longer.
Keenan glared at the witness. Checkmate, Glass thought.
“Now, Detective DiPrima, was that the truth when you testified in Brooklyn?” Keenan asked.
“I can’t answer that question without elaborating on it,” DiPrima whined.
“You can’t answer whether that was the truth without elaborating?” Keenan scoffed. “Why on earth not?”
“Because my answer of ‘yes’ would be misconstrued,” DiPrima explained weakly.
Because your answer is that you committed perjury, Glass thought.
CHAPTER 23
One by one, Mack Dollinger put the Brooklyn cops on the stand to defend the case against Whitmore. And one by one, Keenan either dismissed their testimony as inconsequential or forced them to paint themselves as lazy, incompetent or dishonest. Then, at last, the defense attorney called Detective Edward Bulger.
The heavyweight championship bout is about to begin, Glass thought.
When the detective entered the courtroom, Glass was surprised how much Bulger had aged since he’d last seen him. The paunch was more pronounced, as were the jowls, which hung from the once-square jaw. He looked like he’d aged ten years since the early spring. Then again, “the hero,” who’d solved that generation’s most notorious murders in the New York metro area, had suffered repeated blows to his reputation and pride.
Echoes of My Soul Page 17