Back in April 1964, like a horrifying urban-jungle version of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Whitmore began a nearly decade-long ramble through the justice system that still boggles the mind. It started on a misty morning when Whitmore, 19 years old, African-American, raised in poverty and a grade-school dropout, was taken by a handful of New York City detectives into the 73rd Precinct station house in East New York, Brooklyn. After a 22-hour interrogation by numerous detectives — all of them white — he was coerced into signing a 61-page confession detailing a series of horrific crimes, including, most notably, a brutal double murder of two young white women on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The case had become known in the media as “The Career Girl Murders.” The killings took place on the same day — Aug. 28, 1963 — and perhaps at the exact time that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The confession was front-page news. The Brooklyn cops who were involved congratulated themselves; one was given a special award for exemplary work. But the confession was a fraud. To most objective observers, it didn’t seem likely that Whitmore could have committed the murders. At his arraignment, he told the judge that he’d been coerced into admitting guilt. Few cared: he was a disposable Negro who’d been raised in a shack alongside a junkyard in Wildwood — a “drifter,” described in one account as “possibly mentally retarded.” He was indicted, imprisoned and declared a monster.