Original subtitles

I'm going to tell you the story of three young women

who once lived in New York City.

There was Pat... that's her right there.

And she had two roommates,

Emily, who she'd met in college,

and Janice, a family friend.

Janice hadn't shown up at work that day.

Now, I work with her and I can tell you

Janice being unreliable was hardly something new.

So, none of us were that worried.

I can't believe you didn't even make it in.

Charlie wasn't happy. I can tell you that.

But, when Pat got home to that apartment

and saw what had happened...

Janice?

Nothing would ever be the same.

For her...

Janice?

Or for any of us.

August 28, 1963.

It was hot and sticky in New York City.

You may remember that day because it was the day

of Martin Luther King's famous march on Washington.

I remember it because it was the day my friend was murdered.

Patricia Tolles called Janice Wylie's parents,

Max and Isabel Wylie, who lived nearby,

and she told Max Wylie

that something was dreadfully amiss.

Max told the women to stay there

while he started looking around.

There's his daughter... naked, eviscerated.

Her intestines were out.

She was naked and dead on the floor, blood all over her.

And there was Emily right next to her.

She was dressed, but she was also clearly dead.

They seemed to be entwined in some kind of wrappings.

It was hideous crime.

He walked back into the living room

and explained to them, as calmly as he could,

that both girls were dead.

They had been murdered.

He then went to the phone, picked it up, dialed the police.

This place was swarming with cops very, very quickly.

I knew within five, six, seven minutes of being there,

that was going to be a high-profile case.

Max, I just want to let you know

that we offer our deepest sympathies to you.

I understand, but it's most important

that you figure out what happened.

Max is an advertising guy,

and he was also the creator of "The Flying Nun."

He's a man of stature in New York.

This was the Gold Coast,

where wealthy, fashionable people lived.

If somebody lost their dog,

15 detectives are assigned to the case immediately.

And here were these two women, who were young, fragile.

And a murder like this was sure to manifest huge headlines.

This was a crime that was going to bring

the spotlight on the police department.

The big shots soon arrived, too.

Deputy inspectors, high-level police detectives.

On a case like this,

the police department would not place

anybody other than well-seasoned detectives.

Cavangah is one of the best detectives we ever had.

Emily Hoffert's throat had been slashed from end to end.

Janice was raped, but anally.

And they found noxzema on her anus.

They would also find semen.

There was no DNA.

We didn't have the scientific equipment

that we had today.

All we had was our gut.

Two knives were broken.

It takes a lot of strength to break a knife.

You have to be really angry.

Both girls had been tied up with ripped strips of the sheets,

and that took time to fashion.

This was indicative of someone that had a particular agenda.

They looked around,

and there were valuables around the apartment

and nothing was taken.

This didn't appear to be a burglary.

Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

The window was open.

This was a third-floor window.

There's no way you're gonna get up there.

There was no sign of forced entry,

which automatically means

someone had gotten into the apartment

through one of the doors.

Miss Tolles, I'm Lieutenant Cavanagh.

I'd like to ask you a few questions.

Tell me about Emily.

She was just moving out.

Emily Hoffert was a school teacher.

She had been new to the city,

didn't know too many people, hadn't dated much.

Emily came from Minnesota.

She was very plain.

People have described her as less than plain.

And how about Janice?

She was the life of the party.

Right this way. Watch your step.

Come on, come on.

And right there.

Yes, ma'am. Perfect.

What do you think?

I like it there.

Janice was much more lively.

She was an actress.

She was a bit of a drama queen.

She was smart,

she was full of laughter, and she was fun.

Yes, Mary sunshine.

Put this on for me, dear?

Absolutely. Thank you.

She liked to create a tornado as she walked in the door

and liked to exit as a hurricane.

She had dated a lot. She was an attractive blonde.

I met Janice my first day at newsweek.

We were both assigned to the clip desk.

I wore a hot-pink shirt with white polka-dots.

Of course you did. And a poofy white skirt.

Nude heels, and I got the job.

We all showed up at the clip desk.

We got into our smocks. We wore smocks.

And sat down with our rip sticks.

We ripped out these articles.

We stamped the date on them, and we labeled them for the writers.

Most of us had moved to New York City

from somewhere else.

Janice had grown up here, and it showed.

If you've ever met someone who grew up in Manhattan,

you know what I'm talking about.

They're different. They're exciting.

Now, we came from good schools,

and we had a certain amount

of training, I suppose, behind us,

about manners and that kind of stuff.

I guess you'd say it was an upper-middle-class place.

The girls in that room were from all over,

but we all had one thing in common.

We wanted to work.

We wanted families... sure, someday...

but first we wanted to really do something on our own.

Career girls were very suspect.

They didn't want to marry the boy next door.

They wanted something more.

And ambition was something that you may have had,

but you shouldn't show.

Can you walk me through this again?

Pat told them what she'd told Janice's boss earlier that day.

Emily, we're never gonna see you again, I swear.

You'll see me again. Will I?

I'm just moving. I don't trust it.

Aha! The queen has risen.

Leave me alone.

Janice had overslept... again...

but had gotten up just in time to say goodbye to Emily,

who was actually moving out that day.

Emily had gotten a new cheaper apartment on Murray Hill.

And she was moving her things

from that apartment to the Murray Hill apartment,

and she'd used her friend's car.

Bye, Janice.

I'm leaving now, too,

but I'll be back in an hour or so.

See you soon. Bye. Bye, honey.

She came back and apparently stumbled into the insane scene.

Based on the crime scene and the timeline of the day,

they established that Janice Wylie

was the primary victim.

And so the investigation would have to focus on Janice.

There's an intimacy that's linked with stabbing.

People who stab are people who are inflamed to the point

where they don't just inflict death, they inflict pain.

It had to be somebody she knew, 'cause it was too much hate

for it to be a random act of impersonal violence.

Who might have had the intent or the motive

to kill her so viciously?

We found out about the murders the next day at work.

None of us could believe it.

The story got almost as much coverage

as the march on Washington, which we'd all been watching

in the office the day before...

Maybe at the exact moment Janice was being killed.

It was awful to think about.

The newspapers in New York at that time

labeled the case "The Career Girl Murders."

Hey, did you see this?

It became this iconic murder case

all about how dangerous it is

for young women to live alone in New York City.

Young women in the '60s

were really coming into their own.

We were right on the cusp of getting past the era

when women were not considered safe out on their own.

You lived at home until you got married kind of thing.

But I'll tell you, for us around that table,

for the so-called "Career Girls"...

the only thing we were thinking

was how much we missed our friend.

The public was horrified.

These were two young girls struck down

in the very beginning of their careers...

the prime of their lives.

There was a lot of pressure on the police department

to solve this case.

The more attention that the news gives to it, the more attention

the police department has to give to it.

They immediately start assembling

150 homicide detectives

from the Bronx, from Queens, from Brooklyn.

Cavanagh. Yeah?

Ed Bulger, Brooklyn homicide.

And everybody was going to the 23rd precinct.

That became the headquarters for the investigation.

The main focus was Janice Wylie.

And I don't want to sound flippant, but the thing was,

Janice would have wanted it that way.

She had to be the center of attention... always.

Janice exploded with ambition.

She bubbled.

She knew hundreds of people.

There were parties and dinners and meeting for drinks.

And people... so many people.

And when Janice was hosting, which was all the time,

everyone was invited.

She was a party girl.

She had a lot of relationships and dates.

She had a lot of crushes

for all kinds of men at the magazine.

And she would flatter guys.

She would send cute notes

to the chief editors at newsweek.

It doesn't take a genius

to come to that this is a crime of passion.

They were convinced

that somebody she knew was the perpetrator.

The police started with Janice's little green address book.

So, what was your relationship like with Miss Wylie?

We went on a couple of dates. That's it.

They started looking for old boyfriends.

They started looking for current flames.

Anybody who might be

sexually or romantically interested in Janice,

and somebody who had a history of some sort of violence

or an indication of a short temper.

So, you got a record here?

There were some questionable people in her past.

There was a family friend

who had some sexual crimes in his past.

And that, of course, would fit the bill pretty closely.

We were just friends.

Can you explain why telephone records

show a call from your home on Long Island

to Janice's apartment on July 12th?

There was also a very famous foreign correspondent.

He had an affair with Janice,

and he was married and he had a tremendous career.

And he bristled at the police's interest in him.

I mean, he thought he was too grand to be questioned.

And anyone who knew Janice knew

that she loved all kinds of attention,

not just attention from men.

I hope this isn't going to take too long.

Janice lived for a while in the village

with this woman, Pearl, who was a lesbian.

What exactly was your relationship with Miss Wylie?

Did I fall madly in love with her

and kill her in a hysterical sapphic rage?

Their heads were swimming.

It's a great example of cops plunging into a lifestyle

that they were just way over their heads.

But, they all had alibis... all the people at work,

all the boyfriends, all the girlfriends.

Can your girlfriends corroborate that?

Absolutely.

Every name in that address book led to nothing.

So, the police had to keep looking.

All right, so, first and Lexington, here to 89th.

At this point, they were looking at the unusual suspects.

So they went through their files and said,

"Who had been convicted for crimes against women?"

There was at least 40 to 50 who fitted that profile.

I was assigned to canvass.

Going up and down, back and forth,

getting all the doors, getting the statements.

Hello, ma'am, we'd like to ask you a few questions, please.

They Isolate a block,

and they have everybody go door to door.

They're asking, "Did you see anybody?"

"Do you know anybody?"

Nobody else here hear anything else about it?

In the papers. That's it.

They checked taxicab drivers, storekeepers, bars.

They also reached out

to their squealers... their informants.

That included bartenders, doormen, bookies,

other people in the neighborhood who might know something.

I told you, we haven't heard anything.

You're sure, now?

During the investigation,

one of those who had been brought in

was detective Edward Bulger,

whose regular assignment was in Brooklyn.

Why don't you ladies step out here?

Eddie Bulger was a first-grade detective,

but he was a blunt, brutal man.

He had this belief

that when he questioned black people,

he could tell when they were lying.

He told other detectives that he could always tell

because he could see their stomachs rotate.

He told that to a couple of D.A.'s,

so he got kicked off the case.

He was sent back to his home precinct in Brooklyn

by more subtle detectives

who didn't want to poison the case

with that kind of tactic.

Months went by,

and yet nobody came up with the slightest clue.

And it looked like a hopeless case.

It happening is bad enough,

but it happening and not being solved is terrible.

Two young, beautiful women from good families

were murdered in the middle of the day

in a safe neighborhood.

It was terrifying, and people wouldn't let it go.

Oz Elliott, the great editor of newsweek,

put up a reward for $10,000.

If you transport yourself back to 1964,

$10,000 is probably worth $100,000 today.

They had to bring in other detectives

to help handle the phone calls.

Because of the prominence of everybody involved,

the pressure was enormous to come up with an answer

because people just can't live with uncertainty.

With the amount of pressure that was on there...

there was gonna be an arrest here.

There's a kind of desperation that happens.

A few of them will become

determined to deliver the answer,

because they know whoever delivers the answer

is gonna be a king for a while.

It was all over the news for months.

You couldn't get away from it.

My friend Janice and her roommate Emily had been killed

in their apartment on the Upper East Side.

And they were calling it "The Career Girls Murder."

They said every detective in the city was on the case,

but they still couldn't figure out

who wanted to kill these two bright young women.

Most of the viable leads had been exhausted.

You only can work with leads,

and once you start exhausting your leads,

then it's just sit and wait.

Well, as it turns out,

the development came out of Brooklyn...

out of a totally unrelated case.

If East 88th Street was the Gold Coast,

Brownsville, Brooklyn, was the dust bowl.

Just a few miles away, but worlds apart.

Brownsville was poor and black,

and let's just say when a crime was committed there,

it didn't get a whole lot of attention...

Until now.

One April night in 1964,

a patrolman by the name of Frank Isola

was on his beat when he heard a scream.

As he got to the alleyway, he found a woman.

Here's another book for you, Ms. Borrero.

Her name was Elba Borrero.

She had been a practical nurse,

and she told him as she walked home,

someone grabbed her from behind

and told her he was gonna kill her or rape her.

She had one clue.

She had ripped a button off of his raincoat.

The description of that assailant

was a young black man in his early 20s,

about 5'6 ", 5'7"... lean build.

Isola stopped George Whitmore

near the scene of the attempted rape.

Miss Borrero? Yes?

There's someone here we'd like you to take a look at.

Right now? This way.

The police asked Miss Borrero to look through a peep hole.

I wish I could hear him say something.

Do me one more favor. Say, "I'm gonna kill you."

I'm gonna kill you.

Yeah.

That's him.

Also, she identified his coat...

And the button.

She had ripped the button off the coat,

which became very crucial.

Whitmore was under arrest.

I brought someone in for Borrero...

George Whitmore.

The stuff is over there. All right, thanks.

One of the other detectives at the 73rd precinct

was Edward Bulger.

Bulger was going through Whitmore's possessions,

and there were photos of a young blond woman.

Eddie Bulger, who was kicked off the Manhattan investigation,

takes a look at the picture,

and he says, "That's Janice Wylie."

As soon as he saw that picture,

Bulger, of course, picked up the interrogation.

Hey, Jim.

I just need to ask him a couple of questions.

You got a second?

Hello, George.

Who's the girl?

Now, Whitmore said

that he had found the photos in the junkyard.

To impress his friends that he had white girlfriends,

he would show them these photos.

But the cops didn't believe him.

They spent 17 hours

questioning him about Wylie-Hoffert.

Bulger said he began giving details...

details only the killer could know.

The word gets singing through the wires

that they got a guy for the Wylie-Hoffert case.

The district attorney's offices

in Manhattan and in Brooklyn were called in.

He had given them a 61-page confession

for the massacres

of Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie.

They had solved this seemingly insoluble case.

There were these explosive headlines,

and Brooklyn detectives got an award

from one of the newspapers at that time.

There was nothing but praise for the Brooklyn detectives.

Cheers!

George?

But while the Brooklyn detectives

were celebrating and patting each other on the backs,

there were some who stayed skeptical.

That confession was almost too good

because there's some details about where certain things were,

made no sense that he would know.

Manhattan never closed the case.

Regardless of how far it went in Brooklyn with Whitmore,

they just did not close the case.

I would see Cavanagh

and he would simply say to me, "No."

Cavanagh.

Bulger!

But we didn't know all that then.

All we knew was that the Career Girls killer

had been found.

They convicted him on another charge

while they were building the case against him

for the murders.

And for a while, at least,

girls living unchaperoned in the city

could sleep soundly again.

He knew something smelled wrong here.

He took the picture. He showed it to Max Wylie.

Max said it wasn't his daughter.

And there was something else.

George's mother, Bernadine Whitmore,

was convinced that he was innocent

of the Wylie-Hoffert case

because it was on August 28, 1963.

And like I said at the beginning,

that was a day that everyone remembered.

And that was the thing

that would turn this case around.

As far as we all knew, a man named George Whitmore

had committed the "Career Girl Murders",

but behind the scenes, the story was changing.

I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King.

George!

George!

So, I drove down to New Jersey,

and everybody could place George Whitmore in Wildwood

from virtually 8:00 in the morning

to late at night.

The day of the murder,

he's watching the Martin Luther King speech

in New Jersey.

So, I went back to New York, of course.

I called up Whitmore's lawyer,

and the New York Police Department

went down to Wildwood, New Jersey,

and very easily established his alibi.

But rather than announce

that they might have gotten the wrong man,

they kept quiet.

They didn't want the media and the community

to see them look incompetent,

like we had the wrong guy and now we had nothing.

And so George Whitmore from Wildwood New Jersey,

who had come to New York City to find work,

sat in prison with everyone in the city

still thinking he killed the Career Girls

because all the detectives knew that you can't have

the murder of two young, affluent women go unsolved,

even if you know the real killer is still out there.

For the most part, crimes are solved by luck.

You stumble into something that you weren't supposed to see

or somebody gives you up.

In the early '60s, the main drug,

in terms of serious narcotics, was heroin.

Drugs were rampant.

At one point,

we had to arrest well over 250,000 heroin addicts.

The Upper East Side was sort of like

what was called the border line.

Below 96th street, the junkies looking to get money

came down to do their crimes,

but they went back up to buy their drugs.

And in spite of what everyone had assumed

about Emily and Janice and why they had been killed,

despite all the names in Janice's little green book,

the lucky break the detectives needed

came courtesy of a junkie in the back of a paddy wagon.

A man by the name of Nathan Delaney

was picked up in East Harlem for a murder.

He was a three-time loser,

and a fourth conviction meant an automatic life sentence.

Too bad you had the wrong guy for those murders.

That was just up the street, right?

Wylie-Hoffert?

Too bad you got the wrong guy.

And I know you did.

They literally turned this truck around

and brought him back to the police station.

What do you got?

You want to know who killed those white girls?

Let's hear it.

You got to take care of me.

Delaney said he knew.

He had evidence against the real killer,

but he wanted a deal.

This murder is so big,

and information about this murder is so valuable,

that Delaney gets everything he wants.

And he told them the following story...

that on the day of the murders

of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert,

he was at his own apartment in East Harlem

when suddenly, one of his pals showed up.

He has all this blood on his shirt and on his hands,

and he's, like, sweating, frantically moving around,

and then he just...

What does he say?

He says, "I killed some girls."

Give me a name.

Ricky Robles.

And it turned out that Robles was a familiar face,

not just to the narcotics division,

but to the detectives working the Career Girls case, too.

In fact, they questioned him early on

in the Wylie-Hoffert investigation,

and his mother had given them

what they had considered an iron-clad alibi...

that he had been sleeping that morning

and spent the whole day in her apartment.

And they had dropped any interest in Robles.

The guy was a career burglar,

and everyone in the neighborhood knew it.

So, they picked him up.

Ricky Robles was a known drug addict.

He had served three years for burglaries.

He also tied up a woman in one case.

Where were you on August 28th?

And the story Ricky Robles told the police

was as violent and disturbing as anything they'd ever heard.

Ricky Robles confessed to the Wylie-Hoffert case.

He did admit that he had been out that day to pull a burglary.

And he decided to choose that building

because there was no doorman.

And he went up the service stairwell,

and what he did was pretty unbelievable.

You know, I just looked up and I saw it was open,

and I saw that there was some ledges on the side

I could just kind of put my leg up

and just kind of shimmy my way up the wall.

It's 30 feet in the air.

Okay, so, here's the window, right?

So... I go up here,

and then... There's the ledge, right?

And somehow...

he managed to pull himself up and squirt into the window.

Janice Wylie appeared nude.

He said she was everything he had always longed for.

A blond, white woman...

someone who looked rich and out of his realm.

And he decided he wanted to have sex with her,

and he raped her.

And as he was leaving,

he was heading for the door, Emily Hoffert walked in.

And he grabbed her and tied her up, also.

And when he removed her glasses,

she said to him, "I'll recognize you.

I'm gonna turn you in to the police."

He decided he had to kill them both.

He took some money from Emily Hoffert's purse...

it was maybe $25, $30... and left.

Ricky Robles went on trial

in the late fall and early winter of 1965,

and he was convicted.

He was sentenced to 20 years to life

for the Wylie-Hoffert murders.

But Whitmore had confessed... 61 pages of details.

How could he have done that?

It's not unusual for individuals to falsely confess.

False confessions are brought on

by their desperation to get out of the situation,

be it because they were threatened,

because they think they are going to be offered

some sort of leniency,

or because they're simply confused.

Police officers have been known

to take advantage in those situations,

and that's what happened to Mr. Whitmore.

Bulger, he had been taken off of the case.

Well, as soon as he saw that picture,

this is sort of like his salvation.

This is a career, either, maker or breaker.

Sometimes you forget,

"Am I reminding them of what happened,

or am I telling them what happened?"

After hours of constant interrogation, threats,

Mr. Whitmore finally bowed to that pressure.

That's why DNA exoneration today is so critical,

because there are so many false confessions

that lead to false convictions.

And you would think

that the charges against George Whitmore

would just be dropped, and they were,

but it wasn't that easy.

Whitmore's lawyers had to finally go to court

to get the case dismissed.

The D.A. never did it.

Not one detective was ever brought up

on any kind of departmental charges,

was ever, in any way, reprimanded.

But even after they dropped the murder charges,

George Whitmore was still sitting in prison

on the Borrero conviction.

George stayed in jail for a while,

and then Selwyn Raab came out with a book

where he showed that Elba Borrero

identified two other people before George

and that she was in it for the $10,000 reward.

She was told, presumably by one of the detectives,

that she would be eligible for that reward

if she fingered George.

We found out years later,

they had sent that button to the FBI laboratories

and found out it could not be,

in any way, attributed to the coat.

This is something that the prosecution

never told the defense.

And finally, the last charge

against George Whitmore was dropped, as well.

After nine terrifying years,

Whitmore was finally exonerated in 1973.

They knew that this was an innocent kid.

Two girls got murdered by a drug addict.

That was a very bad thing.

But, to call it "The Career Girls Murder",

that, "If you get too big for your britches, girls",

"This is what can happen."

I think that was taking liberties

with what the story was about.

The papers and the police worked hard

to make it a story about two girls

who had jobs when they should have had husbands.

Anyway, let's talk about more important things,

like if you're coming to Georgio's tonight.

If I can find the blue dishes, I will come.

But maybe they needed to see it that way.

Aha! The queen has risen.

Leave me alone.

The alternative was that two bright, shining lives

had been snuffed out for no reason at all.

And that means it could happen to anyone.

Okay, ladies.

I have to run, but I will see you tonight at Georgio's.

Yes, you will.

And hopefully you'll see me at work, too.

It could happen to me. It could happen to you.

And that is too much to bear.

Bye, honey. Bye.

So, you find a way not to think about it,

to keep it at arm's length.

You shake your head and say, "That's life in the Big City."