The Savage City (6 page)

 

FOR THE NYPD,
the Wylie-Hoffert murder investigation had never really gone away. With media attention and public scrutiny diverted elsewhere, the detective squad in charge of the case continued to interview people and follow up on leads. The case ran into one cul-de-sac after another. Often when this happens, after too many hours of fruitless phone calls, tiring legwork, and second-guessing evidence, detectives will put an investigation on hold and come back later with a fresh eye. But this case was too prominent to shelve.

On March 11, roughly seven months after the killings, the
Herald Tribune
ran a front-page story under the headline “Our City's Number One Unsolved Murder: Who Killed the Career Girls?” After so much
time, the fact that there was no hard evidence or promising suspects was a source of consternation. The press, some city officials, and the public were getting antsy. The killer—or killers—were still out there, capable of killing again.

Around this same time, in nearby Wildwood, New Jersey, George Whitmore Jr. decided he'd had enough of life with Pops. The walls of the family's three-room house, with the auto junkyard just outside, were closing in on him. “I know I should take into consideration my father had a hard life,” George recalled. “Things didn't come easy, and he worked most his life. But I hated my house. I hated it when I woke in the mornin' and my father couldn't get out of bed 'cause he was drunk. And I hated the way he treated my mother—like she was workin' for him or somethin'. I know I should have had some obligations for him, but he didn't have none for me.”

For a change of scene, Whitmore had often spent time in Brooklyn, where he had relatives. He would stay there for weeks or even months at a time, especially when no work could be found in Wildwood. The winter before, George had worked for three months at a metal factory on Long Island while living with his aunt and uncle in Brownsville, in central Brooklyn. George's brothers, Gerald and Shelley, were both living near Brownsville. It was a mere bus and subway ride away.

Whitmore told his mother he wanted to head out for the big city. Maybe he could find some work there.

“You sure that's what you wanna do?” she asked.

“Well, nothin' much for me to do round here.”

“All right, then. Go on. But be sure now to stay with our folks, and take care of yourself, and don't stay out late, y'hear?”

A few days later, George was in a New Jersey bus station playing pinball. His mother had come along to see him off. When his bus was announced, George and his mom embraced. She thought he'd come back soon, as he always had before. George felt in his heart that he was done with Wildwood. He boarded the bus and was off.

Leaving the New Jersey Turnpike and heading toward the Lincoln Tunnel, the spiraling off-ramp offered George a panoramic view of midtown Manhattan across the Hudson River. The towering skyscrapers, dominated by the triumphant spire of the Empire State Building, were a breathtaking sight, a reminder that there was no man-made metropolis like the city of New York. George would cross under the Hudson and
emerge in the Port Authority bus terminal; from there he would transfer to a subway that would take him under the East River and through Brooklyn along elevated tracks to his stop at Rockaway Avenue. There, Whitmore would descend from the station to find his destiny in a ghetto neighborhood called Brownsville.

GEORGE WHITMORE DID
not yet realize that he would be spending some of his nights in Brownsville as a homeless person, but he knew it wouldn't be easy. Having grown up scavenging metal from the scrap yard next door, Whitmore understood that survival was often a zero-sum game. Brownsville was a different kind of challenge: a desolate urban ghetto full of abandoned buildings, deserted, rubble-filled lots, and row after row of dilapidated brick tenements and rickety wooden homes. In nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant, another Negro ghetto, the streets were lined with glorious brownstones from a more prosperous era, now fallen into disrepair; in Brownsville there was nothing. The neighborhood's physical squalor was matched by its spiritual desperation. As one local clergyman put it: “By every number we have to measure the suffering of a community—narcotics addiction, welfare dependency, sickness and malnutrition—Brownsville is a leader. If there is a hell, the people of [this neighborhood] will take it in stride.”

At first, George was able to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Blondell Dantzler, his aunt and uncle, in their cramped apartment on Hopkinson Avenue. But the Dantzlers often had other guests, and on those nights George had to look elsewhere. Sometimes he was able to sleep on a sofa at one of his brothers' apartments, though they too often relied on the kindness of family and friends for a place to stay. Occasionally, George was able to sleep at the apartment of Beverly Payne, his sometime girlfriend.
A seventeen-year-old high school student, Beverly lived on Hopkinson Avenue with her mother in a three-room railroad flat.

On the night of April 23, 1964, Whitmore had been hoping to stay at Beverly's, but her mother wasn't having it. The mother did not approve of her daughter's relationship with an unemployed grade-school dropout from New Jersey who sometimes enticed Beverly to skip school for the day and hang out with him. After George spent a few nights on a sofa in the front room, she laid down the law: no more overnight stays for him.

George spent most of that day with Beverly, but by nightfall he'd gone looking for a place to stay. Reluctant to trouble his aunt and uncle, he headed for an apartment building at 191 Amboy Street where his brother Gerald was staying with a cousin. George himself had stayed there before, but he didn't have a key, and his cousins didn't have a phone, so when George arrived at the apartment he had no way of knowing whether anyone would be home. This time no one was home, so George did what he had done before under the circumstances: he walked across the street to an almost identical tenement at 178 Amboy, where the front door lock was usually broken. Entering the building, he walked to the rear of a musty ground-floor hallway, wrapped his coat around himself, and burrowed into a small space underneath a stairwell. This would be his home for the night.

He awoke around 7:00
A.M.
, stiff and groggy from a night of little sleep. He stumbled out into the daylight, all nineteen years of him, gangly, pimple-faced, a veil of grime on his clothes and face. It took him a while to remember that he'd promised to meet his brother Gerald in front of a Laundromat on Sutter Avenue that morning. He quickly shuffled on over to Sutter, one block away, where he immediately spotted the familiar face of a cop by the name of Isola.

Early the previous morning, George had been standing at the same spot in front of the same Laundromat when he was approached by the same cop, Patrolman Frank Isola. The cop asked him why he was there. George willingly gave his name and told the officer he was waiting for his brother to take him to a day job at a salt-packing plant. He watched the cop jot down the information in a notepad. George didn't mind; he was eager to help.

“I know why you're asking me these questions,” said George.

“Oh?” said the cop. “Why?”

George explained that the night before he'd been walking home from
a pool hall when he heard shots and saw a guy running along Bristol Street with a cop in pursuit. “What was the shooting all about?” asked George.

Officer Isola explained that a woman coming home from work had been assaulted in the street.

“How low can some people get?” said George.

The cop asked George a few questions about what he'd seen. George explained that the guy being chased had disappeared into a building on Amboy Street. George even volunteered to show Officer Isola the building, which he did. Isola didn't bother to write down the building's address, but he did find it noteworthy that George had witnessed the assailant running away. From a street call box the patrolman called his sergeant, who minutes later pulled up in a squad car. Isola gave the sergeant a report. Without even getting out of the car, the sergeant stuck his head out of the window and said to Whitmore, “Between you and me, it's against the law not to tell us where a guy went to when we're looking for him.”

George was startled; that's exactly what he had done. “I did tell you,” he said.

The sergeant shrugged and then said to Isola, “You got this kid's name and place of employment?” Isola nodded; the sergeant drove off. Not long after that George's brother showed up and they headed off for a day of employment at the Schoenberg Salt Company.

Now, here it was the following morning and Officer Isola was back. This time he was accompanied by another guy. The guy was built like a football player, with a barrel chest and biceps that stretched the fabric of his suit jacket. They both approached Whitmore. “Mornin', Officer,” said George.

The big guy spoke first: “Why did you lie to us?”

George stuttered.

Isola explained that the man with him was Detective Richard Aidala. “Your name is George Whitman, correct?”

“No,” said George. “Not Whitman. Whitmore. George Whitmore Junior.”

The cops looked at each other, then at George. They told him that yesterday they had gone to his place of business, the Schoenberg Salt Company. The manager told them there was no George Whitman working there. “Were you there yesterday?”

George explained that he'd gone with his brother to the factory, but when he got there he realized he'd neglected to bring along his social security number, and without that number the company was unable to employ him for the day, so they'd sent George packing.

Whitmore had answers for Isola and Aidala's questions, but the two policemen didn't seem satisfied. Aidala asked, “Would you be willing to come with us to the station house and answer a few questions?”

“Why, sure,” said George. He wasn't the least bit hesitant; indeed, Whitmore had seen enough TV cop shows that he was actually excited by the prospect of helping with the investigation.

The Seventy-third Precinct station house was located near the intersection of East New York Avenue and Rockaway Avenue. It had the look of a Second World War bunker, an imposing redbrick and slate building constructed at the turn of the century in a style known as French Fortress. Like most public buildings in this part of Brooklyn, it had seen better days; there was chicken wire over the windows, a crumbling facade, and weeds sprouting from cracks in the front steps and surrounding sidewalk.

Whitmore was brought into the station house by Isola and Aidala. It was his first experience inside a New York police station. The harsh overhead fluorescent lighting seemed designed to make a person sweat. There was a sickly yellowish hue to the lighting: it had been years since the light fixtures had been cleaned or the walls painted, decades since the floor tiles had been replaced. The building's few windows allowed little natural light to intrude on the institutional surroundings. George had the same feeling many civilians did when they entered this and other precincts in black Brooklyn: that it was the kind of place a person could enter and never be heard from again.

Right away George got the sense that, despite what he'd been told, he hadn't been brought to the station house for “routine questioning.” The cops inside looked at him like he was a criminal. Whitmore was taken upstairs and placed in “the cage,” a makeshift holding cell in the detective squad room. The two cops disappeared.

Damn
, thought George,
why they treatin' me like this? What'd I do?

The two cops returned. Detective Aidala took George into another room and told him to stand. Unbeknownst to Whitmore, in an adjacent squad commander's office, Patrolman Isola and a woman named Elba Borrero were awaiting his arrival. It was Elba Borrero, a twenty-five-
year-old Puerto Rican woman, who had been assaulted on Bristol Street two nights before.

Isola instructed Borrero to look through a peephole in the wall at a person she'd been told was a suspect. Borrero was a small woman, barely five feet tall; she couldn't reach the peephole until the cops stacked some phone books for her to stand on. She peeked through the hole and said, “That's the man.” Then she thought about it for a moment and said, “I want to be sure. Can I hear his voice?”

Whitmore was instructed to say, “Lady, I'm going to rape you; lady, I'm going to kill you.”

When George said the words, Borrero began to tremble. It took the cops twenty minutes to calm her down. “He's the one,” she said.

George was brought into the squad commander's office to face Elba Borrero. He'd heard her through the door claiming he was the person who assaulted her. “Ma'am,” he said, “you makin' a mistake. I never seen you before in my life.”

The woman recoiled in horror; she was immediately led out of the room.

Whitmore stood dumbstruck. The odd confluence of circumstances that had brought him to this moment had fallen like dominoes: if Whitmore hadn't chatted amiably with Officer Isola the previous morning, volunteering information about what he'd seen on Sutter Avenue, he probably wouldn't be standing in the precinct house at this moment. If the officer had copied down his name correctly as Whitmore, not Whitman, Isola and Aidala wouldn't have concluded that George was a liar and therefore worthy of suspicion. If George hadn't been a meek and pliable person—a blank slate—he might not have intrigued Isola and Aidala as the ideal suspect, a wayward Negro boy you could pin crimes on and no one would ever know or care.

There is an expression cops use when they have a suspect who fits the profile of a perpetrator they're looking for: “I like him for that assault,” they'll say. “I like him for this murder.” Officers Isola and Aidala liked George Whitmore. They liked him a lot. In fact, they thought he fit nicely into another case that was being investigated in the Seventy-third Precinct—the murder of a woman in a Brownsville alley two weeks earlier.

The cops immediately called the lead investigator on that case and summoned him to the precinct. In the meantime, George needed to be
softened up. The three of them—Isola, Aidala, and Whitmore—were in the squad commander's office with the door closed. As Whitmore recalled:

After thirty minutes, Detective Joseph Di Prima, the man from the homicide squad, arrived in the squad room.

Di Prima knew what to do: it was called “the Mutt and Jeff routine,” or “good cop bad cop,” part of a detective's official training as laid out in
Fundamentals of Police Investigation,
a manual by Charles E. O'Hara, a former NYPD detective. O'Hara described the tactic: “One interrogator, Mutt, is relentless and menacing, but the other, Jeff, is a kindhearted man…. He disapproves of Mutt and his tactics and will arrange to get him off the case if the suspect will cooperate.”

Di Prima stepped into the role of Jeff. “Are you hungry, George?” he asked. “Can we get you something to eat?”

Whitmore nodded; he hadn't put anything in his stomach in a long time.

The detective sent Patrolman Isola out for Italian rolls and containers of coffee for the four of them. While they waited, Di Prima made small talk with George, taking care to stay away from criminal matters. He asked George about his upbringing in Wildwood and about his life in Brownsville. He asked George about his father and his mother and about whether he'd been able to find much work in Brooklyn. Whitmore was relieved to talk about something besides the crime of which he'd suddenly been accused.

The bread and coffee arrived. When George had finished his, Di Prima got down to business. The detective was there to ask George about a different crime—a murder—but he started with the Borrero incident, with the idea of working inexorably toward the other case. According to Di Prima: