The Savage City

by T. J. English

  George knelt and groped around for the knife he knew wasn’t there. He could tell that the detectives weren’t happy. “Maybe I made a mistake about leaving the knife under the stairs,” said Whitmore. “Maybe it’s over at my girlfriend’s place.” George regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth.

  That got the detectives excited again. “Good,” said Aidala. “Take us over there.”

  They headed to the apartment. Beverly Payne, Whitmore’s sometime girlfriend, was startled to open her door and find George standing there, flanked by two white men in suits who could only be officers of the law.

  Aidala and Di Prima searched Beverly Payne’s apartment thoroughly. They didn’t find a knife, but they did seize some clothing that belonged to George. The detectives told Beverly to get her coat; she was coming with them.

  They all returned to the Seventy-third Precinct. Once they entered the station house, George never saw Beverly again. She was ushered off to a different part of the building, and George was secluded once again in the squad commander’s office. Whitmore remembered: “They stated to me that if Beverly didn’t—if we didn’t come up with the knife, if she had it, they were goin’ to send her to a girls home.”

  After a while, the detectives stopped talking about the knife and came up with another idea. “Let’s go see the murder scene,” they said.

  Whitmore was put in the car once again and driven to Chester Street. The officers pointed out to George where everything happened: That’s where you grabbed Minnie Edmonds. That’s where you threw her down and ripped off her panties. That’s where you cut her with a knife.

  It was early afternoon by the time the detectives and Whitmore returned to the station house. Hungry and sleep-deprived, his head pounding after more than seven hours of physical and psychological manipulation, George felt as though he were tumbling in midair with nothing to break his fall.

  The detectives ordered sandwiches. George was given ham and cheese. When he finished the sandwich, the detectives questioned and cajoled him for another hour or so. Whitmore told the cops whatever they wanted to hear.

  By late afternoon, Di Prima and Aidala seemed satisfied. Aidala called for an assistant district attorney and a stenographer to take Whitmore’s formal confession.

  It took the Homicide Bureau’s assistant D.A. at least an hour to get there. As Whitmore waited in the commander’s office, detectives came and went. Even during his interrogation, other cops had been sticking their heads into the office to see the “perp” who’d “confessed” to two violent felonies in the precinct. One detective seemed to observe the proceedings with more intensity than the others.

  Edward J. Bulger was a veteran who had seen it all. Hawk-nosed, with perpetually pursed lips, graying hair, and a steely glare that criminal suspects found discomforting, Bulger was a detective’s detective. A legend in the Brooklyn North homicide squad, Bulger was old school, the kind of guy who always got his man—by any means necessary. He was about to insert himself into the case against George Whitmore in a way that would have a profound impact on the young Negro’s life—not to mention the very nature of criminal justice in America.

  WITHIN THE RANKS of the NYPD’s detective bureau, there was no talent more prized than the ability to make a person confess to a crime. Some cops were good at the politics of the job, others had a nose for collecting and gathering information; these were skills that were appreciated and sometimes led to promotions. But among the rank and file, nothing was more central to the success of a detective’s career than the magic touch to make a suspect say “I did it” and sign on the dotted line.

  The most common method for extracting a confession was known as the “Third Degree”—a term that would become so ubiquitous in police dramas that it became a cliché. But to the NYPD it was a very specific and effective tactic, a vital means to an end. As far back as 1901, a police reporter for the New York Times traced the origins of the term, which he defined as a procedure that “consists largely in creating an atmosphere around an alleged criminal from which very few can emerge without having committed themselves in some way or another if they are guilty.” That last phrase—if they are guilty—was generous: ideally, the Third Degree was applied only to suspects the police believed were guilty, but often it was used to extract information, or exact punishment, from suspects or witnesses who weren’t giving the cops what they wanted.

  At its most extreme, the Third Degree involved police coercion, violence, or flat-out torture. It was also known as “backroom justice” or “police psychology.” Cops who were good at it knew how to beat or slap around a suspect without leaving so much as a bruise (beating suspects with a thick phone book or an open hand, for instance). Especially brutal cops were known as “mechanics” for their ability to “tune up” a suspect. Robert Daley, who would serve as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of public information for two years, recalled that “the New York police department was, in a sense, renowned for its brutality. Police brutality was considered part of the game. Not always. But let a suspect give a cop a hard time and the cop would hit him…. Cops would tell me about this slap-jack that certain cops had, where you could turn a man’s brain to jelly without leaving a mark. Cops used to carry newspapers in the car so suspects wouldn’t bleed all over the seat.”

  In some precincts, so vaunted was the NYPD’s reputation for brutality that it wasn’t even necessary to use actual violence—the mere suggestion was enough.

  In his twenty-seven-year career with the force, Edward Bulger had become known as a man who knew how to extract confessions. In 1960, he broke a big case involving the shocking death of Margaret O’Meara, a seventy-seven-year-old grandmother who was raped and murdered on Thanksgiving Day 1959. The man who took the fall was David Coleman, a black man who would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. Years later, while seeking a stay of execution, Coleman told a judge how, in January 1960, he’d been arrested for the theft of two typewriters. Detective Eddie Bulger and another detective took Coleman to a Brooklyn squad room, handcuffed him to a chair, and beat him over the head until “I thought the top of my head would come off.” After fifteen hours of questioning, interrupted by five visits to various burglary scenes around the borough, Coleman gave the detectives the confession they were looking for—even though, it would later be proven, he had nothing to do with the rape and murder.

  Bulger’s skills were so well known that, just seven months earlier, he’d been plucked from his assignment in Brooklyn North homicide to work the most famous case in the city, the Wylie-Hoffert murder.

  The rivalry between Brooklyn and Manhattan detectives at the time could be fierce. The boys from the more glamorous borough, weaned on high-profile cases that came under intense press scrutiny, considered the Brooklyn detectives rubes who sometimes used crude and sloppy tactics simply because they could get away with it.

  Detective Bulger was a hotshot on his home turf, but in Manhattan he wasted no time alienating the detectives who’d been running the Wylie-Hoffert investigation for months. One day, he visited the murder scene and discovered in the bathroom a blue plastic wrapper from a package of razor blades—a wrapper not mentioned in any of the police reports. Bulger brought it to the attention of the squad commander, who scolded his detectives for the oversight. Some Manhattan detectives suspected that Bulger planted the wrapper himself. Later, unbeknownst to Bulger, it was determined that—weeks after the murders—a police officer babysitting the crime scene had shaved in the bathroom of the Wylie-Hoffert apartment, absentmindedly leaving behind the wrapper.

  Another matter that annoyed the Manhattan investigators was Bulger’s interrogation technique. Everyone knew how the Third Degree worked, but Bulger could be heavy-handed. One person of interest who was pulled in to be questioned about the Career Girls Murders was a local Negro window washer. Bulger, another detective, and a sergeant hovered over the young man, who had an airtight work-related alibi for the day of t
he murders. Bulger stuck a finger in the guy’s face and slammed a desktop. “You’re the guy who did this. You saw the door open and walked in…then you saw Janice Wylie nude and you had to have her.”

  The sergeant was forced to get between Bulger and the window washer, a guy with no criminal record. Bulger waved his hand to dismiss the man. “All right, get out of here. But I’m not through with you yet.” A week later, Bulger was taken off the case and sent back to Brooklyn.

  On the day Whitmore was being interrogated, Bulger had arrived at the Seven-Three station house late in the afternoon, just as Detective Di Prima was starting to tighten the screws on the young man for the Minnie Edmonds murder. After looking in on the interrogation, Bulger started rifling through George Whitmore’s belongings, which were spread out on a desktop in the outer office. There wasn’t much: some loose change, a paperback book, and Whitmore’s wallet. Bulger flipped through the wallet and came across a photo, a black-and-white snapshot of a girl—white, with blond hair—leaning against the hood of a car in what looked like a park or a rural area with grass and trees. Bulger stared at the photo, then held it up to a couple of nearby detectives. “Hey, this looks like one of those Wylie-Hoffert girls.”

  The room got quiet. Bulger may have been a reject in Manhattan, but out here in Brooklyn he was still a Big Cheese. He was considered the local detective with the most knowledge about the Career Girls Murders, having pored over files, visited the murder scene, and interrogated “persons of interest” himself.

  Bulger ducked back into the squad commander’s office and whispered into Detective Di Prima’s ear. He showed him the photo from Whitmore’s wallet. And with that George Whitmore was pushed further down the rabbit hole into a world of confusion and dread.

  They took him into another room, a small eight-by-twelve-foot interrogation room with a window so grimy you couldn’t see through it, where Bulger told him they would have “more privacy.” Careful not to mention anything about rape or murder, Bulger started interrogating Whitmore about the photo.

  The questions embarrassed George. He’d found the photo months earlier while scavenging at the town dump in Wildwood. He’d liked the look of the pretty, blond-haired white girl in the photo, and put it in his wallet. Later, he wrote on the back of it: “To George from Louise.” It was a ruse he hoped to use to impress friends and family: See, he could say, this is my white girlfriend.

  Flustered, George tried lying to the detectives, telling them Louise was a girl he knew who’d given him the photo. They didn’t believe him. Reluctantly, George told them the truth: he’d found the photo in the garbage and written the inscription on the back himself. The detectives didn’t believe that, either. Di Prima asked, “Couldn’t you have gotten this picture off Eighty-eighth Street?…Didn’t you go into Eighty-eighth Street and go into an apartment and take this picture?”

  At first Whitmore was resistant, but—just as he’d been doing all day long—he eventually relented and told the cops what they wanted to hear.

  Linking George to the horrible events of August 28, 1963, was a slow and torturous process. Whitmore had never been to the Upper East Side of Manhattan; he’d never stepped farther into Manhattan than the Port Authority bus station, where he caught the subway to Brooklyn. If the detectives wanted to create a plausible scenario in which Whitmore somehow made his way to the Wylie-Hoffert residence, entered the apartment, raped Janice Wylie, then brutally murdered her and her roommate, they had a tough job ahead of them.

  Recalled Whitmore:

  They asked me what building was I supposed to go in on 88th Street. I told them I don’t know. And they said I had went into the building and went upstairs, and I told them that I didn’t went into the building. They said, “Sure you went into the building and you went upstairs.” And I said, “Yeah, I went to the roof.” And he says, “No,” he says, “didn’t you see a door crack when you were going up?” And he says, “When you walked—when you pushed the door open, what was the first thing you saw?” And I didn’t say anything. I waited and I said, “The table,” and he says, “Didn’t you see soda bottles?” I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I was confused.

  The soda bottles were an important detail. Both Wylie and Hoffert had been hit over the head with a Coke bottle before they were murdered. The killer would have to know about that.

  The interrogation continued. By now, Whitmore was a willing confessor, but it would still take hours to get all the details straight.

  They didn’t beat me. They didn’t yell at me. They didn’t threaten me. They wasn’t even angry. They asked me didn’t I grab the little girl like I grabbed Missus Edmonds, and I tried to remember what they told me about Missus Edmonds and I told ’em, “Yes, that’s how I did it.” I did more. I showed ’em. I remembered and I showed ’em. They said didn’t the little girl scream the way Minnie Edmonds and Missus Borrero screamed? I remembered about that from before and I told ’em that’s how she screamed. They said, “If you was a burglar and you was in a home and somebody saw you, wouldn’t you knock ’em out and tie ’em up?” And I said I guess a burglar would. They said if’n a burglar got scared, mightn’t he cut the girls? And I said he might. I just didn’t care. I was tired and I didn’t care.

  There were interruptions: because of a shift change, George had to be taken downstairs and booked for the Borrero and Edmonds crimes, then taken back upstairs. Somewhere along the line there was a food break, more sandwiches and soda. Then back to questioning.

  “George,” he says, “do you suck pussy?”

  “I’m not that kind of boy,” I says.

  “I believe you,” he says, “but everybody sucks pussy.”

  “I don’t,” I says.

  “George,” he says, “did you put cream in her pussy when she was on the floor?”

  “You mean,” I says, “when she was knocked out?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “when she was knocked out.”

  “No,” I says, “I couldn’t done somethin’ like that. You gotta be terrible sick to do somethin’ like that.”

  The other detective, he gets up and he yells at me—“Listen, George, if you don’t give me a straight answer in five minutes I’m gonna kick you in the balls.”

  After that, I told them what they wanted.

  Once George figured out that the girls had been sexually assaulted and badly cut up, the thought crossed his mind that the detectives were leading him into a murder confession. “Hey,” he said, “ain’t those girls gonna be mad with me?” He intended it as a trick question to find out if the girls had been killed.

  “Well,” said Detective Bulger, “wait right here and I’ll find out.” Bulger left the room, then returned and told Whitmore, “I just spoke to the girls on the phone. Everything’s okay. They’re not mad.”

  By now, word had begun to spread throughout the precinct and borough command that detectives out here in the bowels of Brooklyn had stumbled across the most notorious killer in the city, and he was spilling his guts.

  The first to arrive was Lieutenant Damien Salvia, the commander of the Seventy-third Detective Squad. It was Salvia’s day off, but when he heard that a few of his men were about to crack the city’s biggest murder case, he rushed in. He was followed by Assistant Chief Inspector Richard F. Carey, the commander of Brooklyn North Detectives. Together, the detectives and their commanders decided to wait before calling in the top brass from Manhattan. The Manhattan detectives would know the case inside out. There was still work to be done before they were ready to share George Whitmore.

  Bulger and Di Prima had come up with a plausible scenario to explain how Whitmore got to the building at 57 East Eighty-eighth Street. They had even gotten George to describe how he perpetrated the act. But they needed to establish without a doubt that George had been in that apartment, that he knew the layout of the crime scene. Detective Bulger gave Whitmore a pad of paper and told him they were going to sketch a drawing of the Wylie-Hoffert apartment.

  G
eorge liked to draw; it was a skill he’d once hoped would be his calling in life. But it was approaching midnight, and he was exhausted.

  “Here,” said Bulger, “I’ll help you.”

  The veteran detective stood behind Whitmore. He put a pencil in his hand, then gripped George’s hand with his own. Together, like a puppeteer and his marionette, they began to draw the apartment layout, room by room.

  Whitmore might have done better if he had glasses on. With his poor eyesight, he could hardly make out what was being put down on paper.

  I was very tired, almost falling asleep. I was in a drowsy fog. The light in the room was sweating. I was sweating. The detective put a pencil in my hand and helped me sketch. He was explainin’ to me where the bathroom and the bedroom was…. They said, “You stay awake; you’re not goin’ to sleep. As soon as we’re done, we’ll let you get some sleep.”

  When George was finished, Bulger had him initial the drawing.

  Now they had something; it was all coming together. Word went out over the police radio: Subject in Manhattan double homicide being interrogated at Seven-Three precinct. Repeat, subject in Wylie-Hoffert homicide at Seven-Three.

  The Manhattan command structure arrived all at once: Assistant Chief Inspector Coyle, Detective Lynch from the Two-Three Detective Squad, Andrew Dunleavy from Manhattan North Homicide, Lieutenant Regan from the chief’s office, and the man himself, Chief of Detectives McKearney.

  Over the next two or three hours—well past midnight and into the early-morning hours—Whitmore was subjected to a numbing litany of accusations, harangues, and questions with predetermined answers. He was introduced to inspectors, chiefs, lieutenants, and homicide detectives. At times, as many as seven or eight men were crowded into the small interrogation room, a sea of white faces descending upon George like a blistering snowstorm. As Whitmore would later point out, “I was the only Negro guy in there. The rest of ’em were white, and at the time, they wasn’t too friendly.”