Richard Robles: The Career Girl Murders, Wrong Man, and Trial

Richard Robles is the man convicted of the Career Girl Murders, the August 28, 1963, killings of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert in their Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. A 22-year-old heroin addict at the time, Robles broke in to burglarize the place, sexually assaulted Wylie, and stabbed both women to death. He was arrested in January 1965, convicted of two counts of first-degree murder that December, and sentenced to life in prison. He is still incarcerated more than six decades later.

What Happened on August 28, 1963

Janice Wylie, 21, was a copy girl at Newsweek studying acting on the side. Emily Hoffert, 23, was a Smith College graduate who had just moved to New York to begin teaching. They shared a five-room rent-controlled apartment at 57 East 88th Street with a third roommate, Patricia Tolles.¹

Robles climbed in through an open window that afternoon, believing the apartment was empty.² He needed money for a fix.³ Inside, he found Wylie. He sexually assaulted her and tied both women to a bed with strips of torn bedsheet. According to the account he later gave associates, Hoffert pulled off his eyeglasses and told him she intended to identify him to police. He killed them both, stabbing them dozens of times with kitchen knives and striking them with soda bottles.⁴ He washed his hands and a knife, took money from the apartment, and left by taxi.

Patricia Tolles came home late that afternoon to a ransacked apartment and called Wylie’s father, who lived two blocks away. He arrived and found the bodies.¹

The Wrong Man: George Whitmore Jr.’s Coerced Confession

About 150 officers worked the case, chasing hundreds of leads for months with no result.⁵ Then in April 1964, Brooklyn police picked up 19-year-old George Whitmore Jr. for questioning on an unrelated attempted rape. After more than 20 hours of nearly continuous interrogation, Whitmore confessed to that crime, to the murder of a woman named Minnie Edmonds, and to the killings of Wylie and Hoffert. His confession to the double murder ran more than 60 pages.⁶

Whitmore said detectives fed him the answers and lied to him, telling him the victims were still alive in a hospital.⁷ Manhattan prosecutors later determined that every detail in his statement was already known to police, and that a photograph of a blonde woman from his wallet, initially described as linking him to the victims, pictured neither of them.⁸ Whitmore also had an alibi: on the day of the murders he was in Wildwood, New Jersey, watching Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on television.⁹

How Police Finally Caught Robles

The break came from the drug world. Nathan Delaney, a 36-year-old addict, was arrested in October 1964 for killing a man named Roberto Cruz. Facing that charge, he told police he had information about the Career Girl Murders and gave a 23-page signed statement. Delaney said Robles had come to his apartment the day of the killings, told him he “had just killed two women,” and appeared to have blood on his clothes. Delaney gave him clean clothes and drug money. In return for his cooperation, Assistant District Attorney Peter Koste promised Delaney immunity in the Cruz homicide; he would be treated instead as an accessory after the fact in the Wylie-Hoffert case.⁴

Starting November 26, 1964, police hid microphones in the Delaney apartment at 330 East 84th Street with Nathan and Marjorie Delaney’s consent, and listened from next door. On January 14, 1965, the Delaneys drew Robles into a kitchen conversation about the killings that was captured on an hour-long tape.¹⁰ Robles was arrested on January 26, 1965.⁸ He reportedly told police, “I went in to pull a lousy burglary and I wind up killing two girls.”³ The Wylie-Hoffert murder indictment against Whitmore was dismissed on May 4, 1965.⁷

Trial and Life Sentence

Robles’s trial ran from October 18 to December 1, 1965, in Manhattan.⁸ The prosecution leaned on Delaney’s testimony and the kitchen recording. Defense attorney Jack Hoffinger attacked Delaney’s credibility, pointing to his narcotics history and inconsistencies between his testimony and his grand jury statement,⁴ and argued that Robles’s own admissions came while he was in heroin withdrawal and without a lawyer present.

Prosecutor John F. Keenan used the trial to expose the misconduct behind Whitmore’s confession, calling Detective Edward Bulger a “disgrace” who had manipulated Whitmore, and establishing that Detective Joseph Di Prima had committed perjury.⁷

The jury of five women and seven men found Robles guilty of two counts of first-degree murder.³¹¹¹²¹³

Parole Denials and Prison Life

A 1970s amendment to New York’s penal law converted Robles’s natural-life sentence to an indeterminate term of twenty years to life, making him eligible for parole after twenty years.¹³ He has never been released. As of May 2016, the parole board had denied him 17 times, citing public safety and the nature of the killings even while acknowledging his clean disciplinary record, an associate degree earned in prison, and his work teaching computer skills to other inmates.²

Robles grew up in the Bronx. In a 2016 interview from Otisville Correctional Facility, he described an abusive childhood under an alcoholic father who, he said, “brought the war with him” from World War II. He started heroin at 14 and dropped out of Stuyvesant High School within days. He also pointed to his brother Michael’s 1958 death in an Army training accident as a formative trauma.²

In the same interview, then 73, Robles told the parole board, “I really screwed up. I’m sorry. If I could change it, if there was some way I could change everything that happened, I would.” He described the murders as an explosion of panic rather than something planned, saying his mind was “like a ping-pong ball” when Hoffert threatened to identify him. He acknowledged the harm done to Whitmore, saying he had not known how to free him without implicating himself. He called himself “totally rehabilitated” while allowing that there was “a realistic and strong probability I will be here until I die.”² As of 2017 he remained at Otisville, one of New York’s longest-serving inmates after more than 51 years.¹⁴

Why the Case Still Matters

The Whitmore confession became one of the most consequential false confessions in American legal history. The Supreme Court cited it in the footnotes of Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which required police to warn suspects of their right to remain silent and to counsel before custodial interrogation.⁶ The case also helped push New York lawmakers to abolish the death penalty for most crimes in 1965, on the reasoning that had Whitmore been condemned on his coerced confession, an innocent man would have been executed.¹⁵

The story carried into popular culture too. Selwyn Raab’s book Justice in the Back Room drew on the Whitmore case, and Whitmore’s ordeal became the basis for the 1973 television movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which gave rise to the series Kojak.¹⁵

1
New York Post. The Career Girl Murders
2
New York Post. The Career Girl Killer Knows He’s Going to Rot in Jail
3
TIME. Two Lives for a Fix
4
The New York Times. Robles Witness Testifies He Was Offered Immunity
5
Vanity Fair. James Ellroy’s Buzz M for Murder
6
NPR. March on Washington: Coinciding Murders Redefined Liberties
7
The New Yorker. The Whitmore Confessions
8
Encyclopedia.com. Whitmore Confessions and Richard Robles Trial
9
The New York Times. George Whitmore Jr., 68, Dies; Falsely Confessed to 3 Murders in 1964
10
The New York Times. Whitmore Called as Witness by Robles Defense
11
The New York Times. Court Reverses Ruling on Robles, Orders Hearing on Double Murder
12
vLex. People v. Robles, 27 N.Y.2d 155
13
vLex. Robles v. Dennison
14
Daily Voice. Career Girls Killer, Prisoner in Orange County, One of NY’s Longest Serving Inmates
15
Los Angeles Times. George Whitmore Jr. Dies