The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Regina Whitmore said.
Mr. Whitmore was 19 in April 1964 when he was first picked up on a
Brooklyn street, in Brownsville, for questioning about an attempted rape
in the neighborhood the night before. A soft-spoken young man, he had
grown up in a house in a junkyard that his father owned in Wildwood,
N.J. He had tried hard in school but dropped out at 17, moved to
Brooklyn and was waiting for a ride to work when the police pulled their
car over and started asking him questions.
He would later tell interviewers that he had secretly been pleased at
being asked for help in solving a crime, and at the prospect of having a
good yarn to tell his friends.
But when his interrogation ended several days later, Mr. Whitmore had
confessed to the attempted rape, and to the rape-murder a few weeks
earlier of another woman in the neighborhood, Minnie Edmonds. He had
also confessed to the double murder in Manhattan, on Aug. 28, 1963, of
two women whose bodies were found bound and stabbed numerous times in
the apartment they shared on East 88th Street.
Called “the Career Girl Murders” in newspaper headlines, the killings of
Janice Wylie, 21, a researcher at Newsweek magazine, and Emily Hoffert,
23, a schoolteacher, had been the focus of an eight-month
investigation.
Mr. Whitmore recanted his confession, and he consistently claimed
afterward that the police had beaten him and that he had signed the
confession without knowing what it was. He said he was innocent. And in
the case of the Wylie-Hoffert slayings, he said, he could provide the
names of a dozen people who saw him on that day and who would remember
it, because it was the day of the civil rights march on Washington, when
Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He and
everybody else in Wildwood had watched it on television and talked about
it incessantly, all day, he said.
In 1964, Mr. Whitmore was convicted by a Brooklyn jury on the charges of
attempted rape. Though the verdict was overturned because jurors were
found to have been reading newspaper accounts of the case, which
referred to Mr. Whitmore as the “prime suspect” in the Career Girl
Murders, he was tried a second time. He was convicted again, but the
verdict was again thrown out, on different grounds.
By 1965, Manhattan prosecutors had evidence that Mr. Whitmore was
wrongly accused in the Wylie-Hoffert murders. They had linked the brutal
slayings to Richard Robles, a recently released prisoner who would
later be convicted of the crime, and who remains in prison.
Still, while Mr. Whitmore now faced a second trial, in the murder of Ms.
Edmonds, his indictment in the Wylie-Hoffert case remained in place.
News accounts said that by refusing to dismiss the indictment,
prosecutors hoped to deny Mr. Whitmore’s defense lawyers an argument:
that the dismissal of the double-murder indictment proved it had been
coerced, and that Mr. Whitmore’s confession to the Edmonds murder,
elicited in the same long interrogation, had therefore been coerced,
too.
Selwyn Raab, a reporter then for The New York World-Telegram and Sun,
and later for The New York Times, had found a dozen witnesses who
remembered seeing Mr. Whitmore in Wildwood on the day of the double
murder. They had bumped into him in the homes of friends and relatives
while watching Dr. King’s speech, Mr. Raab wrote in a front-page story
in The World-Telegram.
“Whitmore’s case showed how fragile the whole system was, and still is,”
Mr. Raab said in an interview on Sunday. “Even now, police use the same
techniques to manipulate suspects into giving false confessions. And 90
percent of convictions are still based on confessions.”
The police and prosecutors at the time denied any misconduct. Legal
reformers asked Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Republican, to appoint a
panel to investigate, but he declined.
Yet Mr. Whitmore’s legal troubles were far from over. With the Manhattan
district attorney still refusing to clear him entirely in the
Wylie-Hoffert case, Mr. Whitmore went to trial for the murder of Minnie
Edmonds, solely on the evidence of his “confession.”
In the debate in the New York State Legislature over a proposal to
abolish the death penalty, Mr. Whitmore’s case became a warning cry
against the killing of innocents. “In Whitmore’s case,” said Assemblyman
Bertram L. Podell of Brooklyn, “we have learned to our shock and horror
that a 61-page statement of completely detailed confession was
manufactured and force-fed to this accused.”
Governor Rockefeller signed a bill in 1965 abolishing capital
punishment, except in the killing of police officers. (The death penalty
was reinstated in 1995, and declared unconstitutional in 2004.) The
Supreme Court cited Mr. Whitmore’s case as “the most conspicuous
example” of police coercion in the country when it issued its 1966
ruling establishing a set of protections for suspects, like the right to
remain silent, in “Miranda v. Arizona.”
Mr. Whitmore was tried several times in the murder of Ms. Edmonds, with each trial ending in a hung jury.
As a result of the various cases in which he had become entangled, he
was in and out of prison, for months and years at a time, until April
10, 1973, when the Brooklyn district attorney, Eugene Gold, dismissed
the last case against him — a retrial of the attempted rape case — with
new evidence exonerating Mr. Whitmore. On his release from custody that
day, Mr. Whitmore said that what he felt was “just beyond expressing,”
adding “I’m not bitter. I appreciate greatly what the D.A. did.”
His life after prison was marked by depression and alcoholism, said T. J. English, author of “The Savage City: Race, Murder and a Generation on the Edge,” in which Mr. Whitmore’s life is chronicled.
Mr. Whitmore moved back to Wildwood, operated a commercial fishing boat
for a time, and was later disabled in a boating accident. He was
unemployed for long stretches.
Mr. Whitmore’s daughter Regina said he had children but never married.
Besides her, she said, his survivors include three other daughters,
Aida, Sonya and Tonya, and two sons, George and James, all of whom have
taken the name Whitmore, and more than 20 grandchildren.
“He told us about what happened to him,” she said. “But he said he never
held it against anybody. He was always a very sweet man with us. He
wanted us to grow up happy.”
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