Center on Wrongful Convictions
The New York Exonerated: George A. Whitmore
A plethora of false confessions
George A. Whitmore, a black eighth-grade dropout with an IQ of ninety, was convicted three times of assaulting and attempting to rape a young Puerto Rican woman in Brooklyn in 1964 — a crime to which he confessed. It is doubtful that the case would have been prosecuted had Whitmore not also confessed to a sensational crime that occurred eight months earlier — the murders of Janice Wylie, a twenty-one-year-old Newsweek magazine researcher, and Emily Hoffert, a twenty-three-year-old teacher, whose mutilated bodies were found in their apartment on the fashionable east side of Manhattan.
The victim of the crime for which Whitmore was thrice convicted was Elba Borrero, a twenty-old-year-old practical nurse from Puerto Rico, who was attacked in an alley near her home in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn at 1:45 a.m. on April 23, 1964. Whitmore, nineteen, was picked up for questioning in the area the following day and, through a peephole in the door of an interrogation room, Borrero identified him as her attacker.
Six months later an all-white jury convicted Whitmore of attempted rape, but the judge delayed sentencing pending the Wylie-Hoffert trial — in which a conviction could carry the death penalty. In January 1965, however, a Manhattan detective discovered that the photo in Whitmore’s pocket at the time of his arrest was not of Wylie but of a New Jersey woman who had lost it. In February, a drug addict named Richard Robles was indicted for the Wylie-Hoffert crime based on tape-recordings surreptitiously made by two of his friends. In recorded conversations, Robles described in detail how he had killed the young women.
Two months later, the Borrero trial judge vacated Whitmore’s conviction after determining, in a state habeas corpus proceeding, that the jury had been racially biased. In March 1966, Whitmore was again convicted in the Borrero case. In April 1967, that conviction was overturned on the ground that the judge had refused to allow the defense to cross examine police concerning the false confession in the Wylie-Hoffert case. The following month, however, Whitmore was yet again tried for the Borrero crime. He was again convicted.
In December 1972, after Whitmore had exhausted his appeals, journalist Selwyn Rabb, who had covered Whitmore’s travails for the New York World Telegram and Sun, obtained dramatic new evidence — an affidavit from Borrero’s sister, Celeste Viruet. The affidavit said that, before Borrero identified Whitmore, police had shown her an array of photos of other possible suspects — and she had identified positively another man as her assailant. By this time, Brooklyn had a new district attorney who confirmed the accuracy of the affidavit. On April 10, 1973, a Supreme Court judge vacated Whitmore’s conviction, officially exonerating him. Whitmore received no compensation for his wrongful imprisonment. — Rob Warden
Last Modified: July 11, 2006
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