The Savage City (7 page)

With George now on his side, Di Prima moved on to the murder case. It involved a forty-two-year-old Negro woman named Minnie Edmonds who had been sexually assaulted and brutally stabbed to death in an alley near Chester Street. As the detective would later tell it:

Whitmore, of course, had a different version of his conversation with Detective Di Prima. George would contend that he knew nothing of these crimes other than the information given to him by the policemen. He did admit that, after the physical abuse he'd taken from Isola and Aidala, he'd begun to fear for his well-being. From that point on his goal—if he had a goal—was to tell the cops whatever they wanted to hear so he could get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

Occasionally Isola and Aidala came into the squad commander's office to listen in on Detective Di Prima's interrogation. Everything was going well. Di Prima fed Whitmore the details:
You approached the woman from behind, you put a knife to her throat and said, “I want to touch your pussy, I want to rape you. Be quiet or I'll fucking kill you, bitch.” You tore her panties off and tried to rape her, but she began screaming. So you cut her with the knife.

Di Prima was careful not to say that George had murdered the woman: that was part of the strategy, to get Whitmore to admit to the facts before he had any idea that he was admitting to murder.

George went along with everything. He was so pliable that the policemen could hardly believe their good fortune. He was a blank slate, an empty vessel to be filled with all the crimes they could make stick.

There was one problem: Whitmore was saying “yes” and “okay” to virtually every detail of the Edmonds murder fed to him by Di Prima—but what about the weapon, the knife he'd used in the attack?

George wanted to help; he wanted to satisfy the cops so that maybe they'd let him go. But he didn't know what to say about the knife.

At this point, Patrolman Isola entered the room and listened to Di Prima questioning George about the knife. Isola left the room, went to
his locker, and returned with a knife. It was metallic, with a black handle and the image of a greyhound on both sides of the handle. “Was it anything like this?” Isola asked Whitmore.

George nodded.

The cops were excited. George had identified
a
knife, but not
the
knife. They wanted to know what he did with it. As George remembered it:

“Where?” asked Detective Di Prima. “Show us.”

George began to sweat. His first thought was that he didn't want his family or relatives to know where he was and what was happening; he was embarrassed. He could think of only one place to direct the cops where he wouldn't run into anyone he knew: his “home” under that stairwell in the tenement building on Amboy Street.

Together with Detectives Di Prima and Aidala and another officer acting as driver, Whitmore was loaded into the back of a squad car. They drove through the streets of Brownsville to the building at 178 Amboy Street. There, George led the detectives inside and showed them the spot under the stairs where he'd slept the night before. Detective Aidala got down on his hands and knees and swept his hands around in the dark space. He found some debris, but nothing else. “You look,” the detective said to George.

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 crimi
nal 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 the 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.