Episode 545: The Career Girl Murders (Part 2)

While the tragic loss of two young lives was particularly shocking, the Career Girl Murders is better remembered as one of the most egregious cases of police coercion and abuse in the state’s history. Eight months after the murder, investigators arrested nineteen-year-old George Whitmore, an intellectually disabled day laborer from whom they elicited a false confession, not only for the murder of Hoffert and Wylie, but also for the murder of a single mother in Brooklyn. Eight more months would pass before the charges against Whitmore were dropped, and several more years before police arrested Wylie and Hoffert’s real killer, twenty-two-year-old drug addict and burglar Richard Robles. The murders of Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie were just two of several high-profile New York City murders t