Walking over to the defense table and standing directly in front of Richard Robles, John Keenan continued his speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, in his own words, the defendant, Robles, incontrovertibly stamps himself and marks himself the killer, not beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond any and all doubt. Never forget that tape, in evidence, when Robles says to the Delaneys, ‘If only I could plant in my mind that this didn’t happen.’ But he can’t plant it there, and it can’t be planted in your minds, because it did happen and because he did it.”
Glaring at Robles, Keenan’s voice rose. “This is not just some homicide case, not some stabbing, shooting or ligature strangulation, although all serious and horrible. We all now know that this murder case was a deplorable outrage, a slaughter, an annihilation, and”—now John Keenan pointed his finger at the defendant, whose face drained of all color—“the annihilator sits right here, the defendant, Robles.”
EPILOGUE
It took the jury of eight men and four women just six hours to reach a verdict. The spectator gallery, which had been packed throughout the trial, had less than a dozen people in the seats—most of them reporters—when the foreman declared, “We find the defendant guilty as charged.”
It was December 1, 1965. A month later, Richard Robles was back in court for sentencing on two counts of murder. Asked if he had anything to say before the court pronounced its decision, he cried out, “All I can say, Your Honor, is that I did not kill those girls. I’m going to jail for something I did not do!” Unmoved, Judge Davidson sentenced him to the maximum the law permitted: life in prison.
For the next twenty-one years, Robles insisted he was innocent and had been framed by the New York DAO and NYPD. Indeed, many people continued to believe that George Whitmore Jr. had committed the crimes, both in Brooklyn and in Manhattan, or that perhaps he and Robles had committed them together.
Then in 1986, at a hearing before a parole board, Robles announced that he had undergone a spiritual rebirth. And now he wanted to set the record straight.
As he’d told the Delaneys and Detective David Downes, Robles explained to the commissioners that he only planned to commit a burglary when he climbed in through the third-floor kitchen window on 57 East Eighty-eighth Street.
“Miss Wylie was in the apartment. I tied her up. She was nude, and I wanted to have sex with her,” Robles revealed.
Later, when Emily Hoffert told him that she was going to remember his face and that he was going to jail, Robles said he decided he couldn’t leave witnesses, who might identify him. “The thought entered my mind. I had to kill. I was out of it.”
When it was over, Robles said, he staggered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. “The blood had drained from my face. I was like a ghost.... I was a ghost.... I don’t know how to describe what I was feeling.”
As of the writing of this book, Richard Robles remains incarcerated in the New York State prison system.
As for George Whitmore Jr., the nightmare continued for years. After testifying at the Richard Robles trial, he was sent back to jail to await his own retrials in Brooklyn for the Edmonds and Estrada cases.
However, before either got under way again, the U.S. Supreme Court, having heard arguments in a case known as Miranda v. State of Arizona, handed down on June 13, 1966, a monumental Fifth Amendment due process, fundamental-fairness decision safeguarding a suspect’s rights against self-incrimination. The court ruled that suspects subjected to “custodial interrogation” would have to be informed by their law enforcement interrogators that they had the right to remain silent, that anything they said could be used against them in court, that they had the right to have an attorney present during any questioning. If they could not afford an attorney, one would be provided to them. It did not prevent police from questioning suspects or using the information they gained to further their investigation; however, failure to provide the warnings meant the information could not be used in court against the defendant.
In reaching their decision, the Supreme Court justices cited the experiences of George Whitmore Jr. Writing for the majority opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren stated that courts must be on guard against false confessions gained by police through intimidation or coercion when the suspect was not afforded counsel: The most recent conspicuous example occurred in New York, in 1964, when a Negro of limited intelligence confessed to two brutal murders and a rape which he had not committed.
The court’s decision would have a profound and far-reaching effect on the way in which police conducted interrogations from that point on. It also had a personal impact on the life of George Whitmore Jr.
In Brooklyn, a new district attorney announced that in light of concerns regarding the questioning of Whitmore by Brooklyn detectives, as well as legal opinions that the Miranda warnings could be applied retroactively, his office would no longer pursue trying him for the murder of Minnie Edmonds.
However, it was not so simple in the Estrada case. Even if the defendant’s statements to the detectives could not be used, they still had an eyewitness, the victim, who maintained that Whitmore was the man who attacked her. And Whitmore had been convicted of the crime, even if it had been overturned. The district attorney decided that the only fair thing to do for the victim was to retry the case and let a jury decide.
In July, George Whitmore Jr. was again tried for the attempted rape/assault of Alma Estrada. She once again took the stand and implicated Whitmore, who this time did not take the stand in his defense. Based on Estrada’s testimony and that of police officer Tommy Micelli, whose “spontaneous” conversation with a young man in a Laundromat did not fall under the Miranda warnings, Whitmore was again convicted.
Whitmore was sentenced to five to ten years in prison. This time he was sent to Sing Sing penitentiary.
However, his attorneys did not give up. After seven months they were able to get him out of prison while his case was appealed on several technicalities. But the appeal could only look at a very narrow set of issues that had occurred during the trial, and not the entire case. In 1971, the New York Court of Appeals ruled four to three to uphold the conviction, though the dissenting judges were harsh in their condemnation of the Brooklyn police and the Kings County District Attorney’s Office, suggesting that their conduct was one of “misconduct and ineptitude.”
Whitmore’s bond was revoked and he was sent back to prison in February 1972. It wasn’t long, however, before new allegations of official misconduct in the Alma Estrada case were raised. Defense investigators uncovered the fact that the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office withheld crucial evidence from the defense, including: Estrada had made contradictory statements to police officers regarding her identification of Whitmore; a relative claimed Estrada had originally identified another man; most damning, the FBI analysis of the button and thread Estrada tore from her assailant’s coat did not match the buttons and thread from Whitmore’s coat, as the prosecution had intimated at trial.
District Attorney Frank Hogan, ADA John Keenan and ADA Mel Glass made several attempts to persuade the Brooklyn DA to exonerate George Whitmore Jr. He was finally released from prison on April 10, 1973. Not counting the time he was out on bond, he spent almost three and a half years in jails and prisons for crimes he did not commit.
The legendary district attorney Frank Hogan remained in office for thirty-two years. He suffered a stroke in August 1973 and died in February 1974, leaving behind an office known for its integrity, professionalism and the even-handed application of the law to all.
John Keenan became head of the Felony Trial Bureau and then later the chief of the Homicide Bureau. In 1983, he was appointed as United States Federal District Court judge for the Southern District of New York. Like his dear friend and colleague, Mel Glass, Keenan has served on the bench, as he similarly performed in the Frank Hogan DAO, with grace, dignity and courage.
Although their reputations were damaged by the Whitmore investigation, and there were calls for criminal charges of
malfeasance and perjury, the Brooklyn detectives were never held accountable. They continued to maintain that they did nothing wrong. No one, however, was ever able to explain how exactly George Whitmore Jr. was able to give a detailed confession and then a sixty-one-page Q&A statement to ADA James Hosty to a crime he didn’t commit, or draw a diagram of an apartment he’d never been in.
Along with the Miranda warnings, the Whitmore snafu would continue to reverberate down through the years. It marked the beginning of a ten-year ordeal of racial tension, riots and turmoil in the city. The reputation of the NYPD suffered a tremendous blow, particularly in the black community, from which it never completely recovered.
Mel Glass became the youngest bureau chief ever appointed by Frank Hogan, first as the chief of the Complaint Bureau, and then the chief of the Criminal Courts Bureau, where he was also responsible for the training of new ADAs. In 1973, he was appointed a criminal court judge and thereafter an acting New York Supreme Court justice, where his service spanned two decades. While on the bench, he distinguished himself as a brilliant jurist not only for his encyclopedic knowledge of the law, but also for his even-handed fairness and respect for the maintenance and enhancement of the dignity of the justice system. His passion to do justice never waned. He passed away in May 2010, surrounded by his loving and devoted children and grandchildren.
For all of the damage Richard Robles did to other lives when “something went wrong” on August 28, 1963, none was greater than what he did to Max Wylie. In the years following the trials, Wylie’s wife, Lambert, and his older daughter, Pamela, both died of cancer.
In 1975, alone, grieving and unable to remove the images of his daughter’s brutalized body, and that of Emily Hoffert, from his mind, Max Wylie placed the barrel of a .38-caliber gun against the side of his head and pulled the trigger.
POSTSCRIPT
Classics are ageless. They don’t wither in time. For them, there is no statute of limitations. They are intrinsically an expression and reflection of a value system and culture.
At their most compelling, they suggest a moral dimension that exists and ought to influence and determine the decisions that we make in our private and public lives. Certainly, public officials are mandated pursuant to our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence/Constitution—two promissory notes, if you will—to be guided by and act consonant with these moral and legal precepts. Unfortunately, all too frequently, the historical experience suggests otherwise.
Yet, there are heroes amongst us. Frank Hogan, Mel Glass and John Keenan qualify, in my judgment, as Arthurian knights of the Round Table. From them, I witnessed up close and personal the actual functioning of the inner sanctum of a ministry of justice operating on a case-by-case, qualitative analytical, apolitical merit-driven basis.
DA Frank Hogan was truly a legend long before Wylie-Hoffert occurred. Once convinced that Mel Glass’s gut instincts and subsequent investigation were legit, and that George Whitmore Jr. was wrongfully indicted for the most gruesome and sensationalized double murders and rape in the media’s radar, Hogan was prepared to admit his mistake, possibly fracture his career’s reputation and exonerate an impoverished young man with an IQ lower than 70. And why? Simply and manifestly, because it was right; justice demanded it.
I first met Mel Glass and Frank Hogan during the interview hiring process. After my interview with Mel, I was sent to Hogan for final evaluation based upon his recommendation.
Having just graduated from law school at Berkeley, I returned home to New York, took the bar and started working at the Manhattan DA’s Office. For the first three years of my tenure, I served in the Complaint and Criminal Courts Bureaus, mentored by my bureau chief, Mel Glass. He instilled in me the basics, the fundamentals of the blocking and tackling of precisely how to administer justice. He always held firm to the ideal that the two most important responsibilities of the DA are to exonerate the unjustly accused and proceed to prosecution only when there is unquestioned factual guilt corroborated by legally admissible evidence sufficient to convict the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt.
Mel Glass always avoided media exploitation. He never sought to capitalize monetarily or otherwise from, as he put it, “simply doing my job.” After the conviction of Richard Robles in Wylie-Hoffert, Mel turned down an offer of $150,000 from Life magazine to reveal the “real” inside story.
After several years I graduated from Mel’s tutelage, while serving in the Criminal Courts Bureau, to the elite corps, the Homicide Bureau. There I was mentored by John Keenan. How fortunate was I to be trained by Mel Glass and John Keenan? Sort of like playing at Notre Dame under Ara Parseghian and then to Green Bay coached by Vince Lombardi.
From Mel, it was all about the basics; from Keenan, it was the precision, drama and art of trial practice. He was truly a master, without equal.
To Frank Hogan, Mel Glass and John Keenan, I owe my professional career.
Approximately four years ago, Mel asked me to write this book. After all that had been written, he wanted the true story to be known. He supplied me with the actual trial transcripts, some of which is quoted in Echoes of My Soul, crime scene photos, police reports, autopsy protocols, his contemporaneous notes and other investigative material. Most valuable, however, were his insights and detailed recollections of the events. We spent countless months going over the material, which was voluminous. Throughout all the time we shared going over the case, his only admonition was that I must always remain objective. I have endeavored to do just that.
On one level Echoes of My Soul speaks volumes about how a committed individual, Mel Glass, can make a huge impact. A triumphant, uplifting justice victory delivered by a dedicated young Hogan acolyte, whose soul was pure, intact and righteous.
Yet Echoes of My Soul is much more meaningful. To do justice in our lives, to be civil, tolerant, rational and forthright is to enhance the dignity not only of ourselves but of the public office we may occupy, the job we hold and the culture in which we thrive. Those values are timeless. We need to experience them so that we may always be reminded who we are and from where we came. When faced with cultural coarsening, we seek affirmation of triumph. Echoes of My Soul satisfies that need.
Sometimes it is necessary to remind ourselves of the authenticity of American exceptionalism. We are a moral people. We attempt to institutionalize virtue. We recognize that evil exists and it must be confronted and defeated.
Mel Glass, John Keenan and Frank Hogan made decisions that were morally inspired. They embodied and personified the spiritual essence of American exceptionalism.
The path they placed me on was paved with principle and integrity that led to justice. That’s the stuff, the foundational basis, upon which a “Ministry of Justice” is constructed. For granting me this invaluable experience, I am, and will be, forever grateful.
ECHOES OF MY SOUL
NOTE
The following names of individuals have been changed
and are not their real names:
Vic Arena
Louie Ayala
Frank Backer
Mack Dollinger
Alma Estrada
Ricky Getz
Liam Gynt
Harry Hart
Jennifer Holley
James Hosty
Tim Krupa
Harold Lasky
Lenny Meyers
Tommy Micelli
Abbe Mills (Abbe Romano)
Dr. Morris
Katherine “Kate” Olsen (Fagen)
Peter
Dr. Lucille St. Helme
Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were slain in their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on August 28, 1963. (New York Daily News/Getty)
The front of their building at 57 East 88th Street, looking west.
The entrance to the victims’ residence.
The double doors leading into their building.
The lobby of 57 East 88th Street, showing the door that led to the service area. Access to
this door became an important issue at the murder trial.
The bedroom where the murders took place. A knife—one of the murder weapons—is seen on the radiator (circled).
The victims, partially covered with a blue blanket placed on their bodies by Janice’s father Max Wylie when he found them. The clock radio, unplugged by the killer, showed the time as 10:35. Emily’s glasses are on the bed, and the handle of the knife is seen on the radiator.
The bathroom located near the bedroom where the bodies of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were found. Note one of the murder weapons that the killer placed on the bathroom sink.
The living room, facing the windows. The TV was on to show Martin Luther King, Jr., delivering his historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C.
Echoes of My Soul Page 20