Career Girls Murders
| Date | August 28, 1963 |
|---|---|
| Location | New York City, New York |
| Deaths |
|
| Suspect(s) | George Whitmore Jr. |
| Convicted | Richard "Ricky" Robles |
The "Career Girls Murders" was the name given by the media to the killings of Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie in their apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on August 28, 1963. George Whitmore, Jr., was accused of this and other crimes but later cleared.
The actions of the police department led Whitmore to be improperly accused of this and other crimes, including the murder of Minnie Edmonds and the attempted rape and assault of Elba Borrero. Whitmore was wrongfully incarcerated for 1,216 days — from his arrest on April 24, 1964, until his release on bond on July 13, 1966, and from the revocation of his bond on February 28, 1972 — until his exoneration on April 10, 1973, when, after what author T.J. English called, in his book The Savage City, "a numbing cycle of trials, convictions, convictions overturned, retrials, and appeals", Whitmore was cleared of all charges and set free. Whitmore's treatment by the authorities has been cited as an example that led the US Supreme Court to issue the guidelines known as the Miranda rights. 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, including the right to remain silent, in Miranda v. Arizona.
On August 28, 1963, Patricia Tolles, 23, who worked at the book division at Time-Life, returned to her apartment on the third floor of 57 East 88th Street. There she found the apartment ransacked and covered in blood. In a bedroom were the bodies of her roommates, Newsweek researcher Janice Wylie (aged 21), and schoolteacher Emily Hoffert (aged 23). Both had been stabbed over 60 times with knives from their own kitchen, and there was evidence that Wylie, who was wearing only a towel, had been sexually assaulted.
The case was dubbed the "Career Girls Murders" by the media because Wylie, the daughter of advertising executive and novelist Max Wylie and niece of novelist Philip Wylie, and Hoffert were representative of the thousands of young women who had come from all over America to New York to seek jobs and careers. Others like them now felt unsafe and the police were under pressure to solve the case. Hundreds of detectives were assigned to the investigation and thousands of people were interviewed, but as the weeks went by no arrests were made.
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Wikipedia