Echoes of My Soul

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Mel Glass shook his head. “I can’t make that commitment.”

  “Then let me talk to Al Herman,” Dollinger suggested.

  “Talk to anybody you want, including Hogan,” Glass responded.

  The defense attorney had then gone back to Robles, who, in his attorney’s absence, had confessed to Downes and the other cops who’d entered the room. There was no claim or anything to suggest that anyone had threatened his client, or abused him, or tricked him into anything. Simply put, Robles’s guilty conscience had gotten the best of him finally.

  Glass had no objection to a defense lawyer zealously representing his client and forcing the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It was the crucible, the sine qua non, of the truth-finding trial process. That was as it should be. But to know that his client had committed the murders, and yet turn around and obfuscate the truth to the jury about the alleged venal motives of the police and DAO—actually stoop so low as to accuse them, with no factual basis in the record, of committing crimes to frame his client—well, that went beyond the pale, Glass believed.

  It was clear to Glass that Dollinger was desperate. In both his examination and cross-examination of the witnesses, John Keenan had carefully debunked George Whitmore Jr.’s confession, while demonstrating why Richard Robles’s incriminating admissions were to be believed.

  Reaching deep into his arsenal of advocacy, Dollinger conjured up what many defense attorneys resort to when the facts and the law do not support their cause: the frame defense.

  “The district attorney’s office felt that the case against George Whitmore wasn’t strong enough because that piece of circumstantial evidence—that photograph that George Whitmore said came from the apartment—they found out couldn’t have come from the apartment,” Dollinger said. “They felt that the inconsistency in the George Whitmore story made the case against Whitmore something they would prefer not to try.”

  Dollinger walked over to stand in front of the prosecution table. “The Delaneys were their deliverance, because only through the Delaneys could they possibly get somebody else to stand in for George Whitmore,” he said. “And perhaps save the honor of the police department. They had to get a stand-in and they didn’t care if it made sense or not.”

  Shaking his head as he glanced at Keenan and Glass, Dollinger continued. “If Robles were not an addict, if he were a human being like you or me or somebody else, do you think he would be on trial in this case? Do you think he would be the person that they would ask you to convict? Do you think that they would suggest to you that based on this evidence, on these facts, that this man is guilty if he was not an addict? He’s a perfect patsy for the police, perfect.”

  Mack Dollinger whirled and walked back to stand next to his client. “Who is going to come to his defense? Who is going to scream and yell about him? Who cares about an addict? Who cares?”

  Patting Robles on the shoulder, he added, “When they find, or if they find, the right man, then the prosecution will offer Mr. Gynt as their witness and not leave it for the defense to offer him as ours.”

  Mel Glass was still seething when court recessed for the afternoon and he went back to the office with John Keenan to prepare for the People’s summation the next day. The skull session began with Glass shaking his head and blasting Mack Dollinger’s tactics in frustration and anger.

  “John, maybe I’m in the wrong business,” he lamented to his colleague. “I’ve been at this for seven years, tried scores of felons for all kinds of mayhem they perpetrate on innocent people, and have heard all sorts of excuses from defense attorneys. But listening to Dollinger’s summation was such an incredible outrage—a position that is so contrary to the truth.”

  As Glass paced about the office, Keenan took a seat and let his younger colleague vent. “Two girls get slaughtered and the defendant’s admissions are completely corroborated,” Glass went on. “And with no evidence, just rank speculation, Dollinger tells the court and jury that we framed his client. And how do we do it? According to the defense, we picked out two people, the Delaneys, who we don’t know, who have criminal records up the wazoo, and we tell them to tell us to incriminate someone we don’t know. And, of course, we are so venal, we let the real killer roam the streets with impunity. And this ‘patsy,’ this so-called stand-in, Robles, who we don’t know from borscht, lo and behold, makes admissions on tape that corroborates what he told Downes, the police brass and the Delaneys. What a coincidence! And this nonsense with Gynt, the doorman? Give me a break here!”

  Glass sat down on a club chair. “And let’s get this straight, the only reason Gynt appears in this case is because we presented him to the defense on a silver platter. The defense knows that the reason we didn’t call him is because of the conflicting versions he gave about what, if anything, he saw and heard. And he’s totally unreliable.”

  Sighing, Glass looked at Keenan. “And, John, what really rankles me are the Brooklyn cops. Instead of admitting they made a mistake, they circled the wagons, stuck to their stories that Whitmore is the guy and gave Robles a complete defense.”

  Glass threw his hands up in the air. “What in the hell is happening to our justice system!”

  It appeared that Glass had run out of steam, so Keenan chose that moment to speak. “It’s okay, Mel. We made a mistake and we’re paying for it. But what you did was restore the credibility of our office and everything the justice system is about. We’re going to convict this fine fellow, and we have you to thank for it.”

  Glass looked over at Keenan, one of the best of the best, who’d won scores of murder convictions in his career. Keenan was smiling, and suddenly Glass felt humbled. He grinned.

  “Okay, okay . . . let’s talk summation,” Keenan suggested.

  “I think you start with showing again why Whitmore’s confession is untrustworthy,” Glass said as he began to tick off the reasons. “John, it’s not just that what Whitmore said was inconsistent with certain facts, the scenario he was presenting doesn’t square with what happened. He’s connecting dots that have been laid out by the Brooklyn cops. For example, Bulger tells him that he just spoke to the girls and they’re alive. So what does Whitmore do? He says he pulled down the window shade because he was afraid they might get up after he stabbed them. But the real killer knows damn well that these girls, after he butchered them, would never be standing up again, much less be alive.”

  Keenan tapped the legal pad he’d been making notes on. “And, of course, Mel, the killer would have known right then that the cops were lying. But not George Whitmore, because he had no reason to believe otherwise.”

  Glass nodded. “Then Bulger’s got Whitmore going through the lobby door that doesn’t open, with no Exit sign on it, leading to God knows where, and gets knives from a kitchen table that doesn’t exist. Oh . . . and he said he entered the apartment through a service door that Kate Olsen testified was bolted locked.”

  Glass paused and rubbed his chin. “And let’s not forget the Whitmore Q&A with Hosty. It first starts at two A.M. and ends at two-fifty in the morning. Then an hour goes by and they pick it up again at four oh-three and this one ends at four-twelve A.M. And here’s another example of the Brooklyn cops trying to conform Whitmore to some immutable facts—like what Robles really did to the two girls.”

  Picking up a copy of the Q&A that recommenced at 4:03 A.M., Glass read:

  Question: Now, George, I’d like to clear one further thing up. You originally told me you cut her a few times around the face?

  Answer: Yes.

  Question: Was that correct?

  Answer: No.

  Question: Where do you cut her?

  Answer: In the stomach.

  Question: How did you cut her around the stomach?

  Answer: Sliced.

  Question: How many times did you slice her on the stomach?

  Answer: Two or three times.

  Glass flipped the Q&A onto the conference table. “Bulger knew from seeing those cr
ime scene photos of the deceased that Janice Wylie was disemboweled. So, of course, he wasn’t satisfied with Whitmore saying he cut her around the face. I wonder what happened in the hour or so in between the two sessions. It’s a classic example of someone talking about a case that’s totally separate from reality.”

  Then there’s the photograph, Glass noted, which was the sole reason Detective Edward Bulger thought to question Whitmore about Wylie-Hoffert. “If he’d stopped and thought it through, Bulger would have known it didn’t make any sense. What killer is going to keep something of significant evidentiary value, a photograph, allegedly of the deceased no less, tying him to the murders, for eight months and write, ‘To George From Louise’ on the back so that he could show it to his friends? Keep a photograph of the victim in the most infamous murder in the city, show it around, bragging, ‘This is my girlfriend,’ and not worrying that someone might say, ‘Hey, that’s Janice Wylie’?

  “It was a disgrace,” Glass pointed out, “for Bulger to ignore Lynch’s report from Max Wylie that the blonde in the photograph wasn’t his daughter.”

  Glass noted the substantial difference between Whitmore’s reaction to the accusations and that of Robles. Throughout his interrogation Whitmore either quietly denied his complicity, asked to go home or repeated what the detectives had fed to him in a dry monotone.

  “Compare that to Robles who broke down crying,” Glass said. “And says after he confesses, ‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Please, I want to erase it from my mind.’ Which one sounds like he has a guilty conscience?”

  Just as he’d once set up the mosaic of the prosecution case, the next day, Keenan methodically placed each tile together leading to the full picture revealing the guilt of the defendant “beyond any and all doubt.” As Glass sat in his seat and ticked off the points on his legal pad, Keenan took command of the space in front of the jury, laying out each.

  “Isn’t it perfectly clear that Whitmore had about as much to do with killing Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert as Abbe Mills did?” Keenan asked the jury. “Mr. Whitmore was Trilby and Bulger was Svengali, and that’s the way it worked.... I submit to you that Mr. Whitmore doesn’t have the vaguest idea what happened to him that night in the Seventy-third [Precinct] Detective Squad.”

  Keenan followed through on his conversation with Mel Glass that the Whitmore statements were totally disconnected from reality—that they weren’t merely inconsistencies.

  “So let’s look at Whitmore’s route home to Brooklyn,” John Keenan said. “That is the most magical part of the whole Whitmore statement, it’s from Alice in Wonderland. From Eighty-eighth Street he walks back to Forty-second Street. He takes the subway home from Forty-second Street to Brooklyn. He gets out of the subway, walks to his house about eight and a half blocks from the subway station. And what does he do? He sits on his stoop. And then what does he do? He goes to his uncle’s house to borrow money to buy a hot dog.”

  Keenan held his arms akimbo and, shaking his head, exclaimed, “Where’s the blood? Where was the blood on Whitmore? It wasn’t on Whitmore. It was on Robles’s left trouser leg. It was on the green shirt that was in the paper bag when he got to the Delaneys’ and had saturated through to the T-shirt underneath. That’s why there was no blood on Whitmore.”

  Keenan picked up the Q&A statement and held it up for the jury to see. “The blood wasn’t on Whitmore, who in this statement said that he took the knives from the kitchen table drawer. The blood wasn’t on that man. You know why? Maybe you forgot this. There wasn’t a kitchen table in the kitchen, so there couldn’t have been a drawer.... Remember when I asked Bulger about the lobby door that led to the service stairway? He told you he didn’t know very much about that door. Kate Olsen testified she didn’t even know where that door led to. But Whitmore went through the locked door with the nonexistent Exit sign, leading in his mind to God knows where, and gets knives once allegedly inside the apartment from a kitchen table that doesn’t exist.”

  Keenan turned and pointed at the defendant. “And when you blow the Whitmore smoke away, do you know who sits in front of you? Richard Robles.”

  Turning back to the jury, Keenan changed direction. “Now let’s start talking about some of the affirmative evidence here and let’s put the smoke behind us. Let’s talk about the Delaneys. What can you say about the Delaneys? They’re no angels. They’re not pillars of the community. They’re not, in Mr. Dollinger’s words, bank vice presidents. The Delaneys told you, a friend of theirs—not an enemy, a friend of theirs—not someone they had a grudge against, but a friend, the common-law husband of Mrs. Delaney’s aunt. They tell you that Robles, their friend, admitted the killings to them.”

  Keenan put his hands on his hips as he looked at the jurors and rocked back a little on his heels. “I told you in the very beginning of my summation, of my introductory remarks, that a trial is a search for the truth under the rules of evidence. So how do we know that the Delaneys are telling us the truth? Do you think that the Delaneys knew that Abbe Mills, the girl in People’s seventy-two in evidence, had been located? Do you think the Delaneys knew that? As a matter of fact, for all the Delaneys knew, and for all anybody in the public knew, for all the world knew, other than certain police officers and certain district attorneys, and quite obviously Abbe Mills, for all anybody knew, the case was solved and it was George Whitmore. Why should the Delaneys mention a solved case? Why should they mention a case that was closed? Why? Because they really knew something about it, that’s why.”

  Glancing at the defense table, Keenan went on with his summation. “Now the defense suggests in this Machiavellian frame scenario that Robles was made a stand-in for Whitmore. And that somehow the Delaneys got into this act and suddenly the Delaneys came up with Robles’s name. How did this all happen? Did the detectives go up to Jimmy Delaney and say, ‘Hey, Delaney, listen. We’ve got to build a case against somebody because the police department is embarrassed because of this Whitmore situation.’ Did somebody go up to Delaney and say, ‘We want you to give us some information on a case you don’t know anything about. Hey, but don’t worry, we’ll give you the information and then you give it back to us. And then you come to an assistant district attorney and you tell it to him.’ Is that the way it happened? Where is there any evidence of this?”

  Keenan furrowed his brow and shook his head. “Why does Delaney give Robles’s name, unless Robles is the killer? Why does he pick on a friend? And if it’s a frame, why in the world does Delaney involve his wife? If this is a frame-up, a concocted story between the Delaneys as to the defendant coming to their house, why would Jimmy Delaney complicate it by getting his wife involved? He certainly wouldn’t involve his own wife because he knew his own wife was the niece of Robles’s common-law wife. He wouldn’t have involved Mrs. Delaney. You know why he said his wife was there? Because she was there. Do you know why Delaney said he went to buy narcotics? Because he did go buy narcotics and left his wife there. But the truth makes sense. Where would Robles go after killing these two girls? Would he go to the home of a bank vice president? Or would he go to the home of friends who can give him what he needs right then—first a fix and then a change of clothes.”

  Looking each juror in the face, Keenan then moved forward up to the jury rail. “Lest there be any doubt about the credibility of the Delaneys, we know from the testimony and how this case unfolded that the Delaneys are telling us the truth, the whole truth. We know this, don’t we? And from the evidence you know how and why. In their statement that the Delaneys made on October 19, 1964, they told Mel Glass that when recounting what Robles said to them, they recalled that he said that during the course of the murders the odor was awful. We know from the testimony of chief medical examiner Dr. Helpern that because Robles punctured Janice Wylie’s intestines three times, there was emitted into the room a foul odor. So the science of this case, as testified to by Dr. Helpern, a world-renowned forensic pathologist, corroborates, beyond any and all doubt, what t
he Delaneys told us that the defendant told them. So either they’re absolutely telling us the truth, or they had a crystal ball and made it up out of thin air and forecasted the future—they forecasted the scientific analysis. We also know from the evidence that there were absolutely no police reports that made notice of any odor in that room. So much for the defense suggestion that the Delaneys are merely puppets in this fantasy conspiracy to frame the defendant.”

  Keenan walked over to the prosecution table and picked up the photograph of a rear view of the building at 57 East Eighty-eighth Street showing the protruding vents and kitchen windows. He held it up for the jury. “How do we know that Detective Downes, Lieutenant Sullivan and Sergeant Brent testified truthfully about the defendant’s confessions to them in the clerical office located on the second floor of the Twenty-third [Precinct] Detective Squad room on the night of January twenty-sixth of this year? They testified that Robles told them that he entered the apartment by climbing through the kitchen window. The testimony in the record is that right after Robles confessed, the police went to 57 East Eighty-eighth Street and checked out the exterior area, looking at the vents in relationship to the kitchen windows. And two days later, photos were taken. So what did they do that night when Robles told them, ‘I went through the window’? They went over to the building. If he didn’t make those admissions, why would they have gone over to the building to look? Why would they take the photos? Is this part of what the defense wants you to believe that there’s a master conspiratorial plan? There is no evidence of it. Logic and common sense suggests, supported by the evidence, that the police are telling the truth.”

  Keenan wrapped up by talking about the tapes. “Now remember when you heard the tapes that contained the recorded conversations between the Delaneys and the defendant in their apartment, and on one of them you heard Robles say to the Delaneys, ‘If I could only plant in my mind that you made this up, and it really didn’t happen, like I would take that test.’ And he was referring to the lie detector test. Do you remember Robles then said, ‘I can’t beat a lie detector test.’ He couldn’t plant it in his mind, because it did happen, and because they, the Delaneys, did not make it up. He did kill the two girls. That’s why he broke down and cried when questioned by the detectives. And that’s why he said he was relieved when he learned that Whitmore had been arrested.”