Who will Mourn George Whitmore?

It would take nine years for Whitmore to clear his name. It wouldn’t have happened without the help of many lawyers, a few newspaper reporters and the civil rights activists. Though the “Career Girls” murder charges were dropped early on — and the actual killer, Richard Robles, was eventually tried and convicted — Whitmore had also been forced to confess to another murder charge, and the assault and attempted rape of a woman in Brooklyn. There followed a numbing cycle of trials, convictions, convictions overturned, retrials and appeals. Whitmore went from being a nobody to being a perceived murderer to being a terribly “wronged man” and back to being a nobody. In prison, he learned to make rotgut hooch and, trying to dull the pain, became an alcoholic.

In April 1973, he emerged triumphant. A few weeks before all the charges against him were finally thrown out, CBS broadcast a highly promoted movie-of-the-week based on his ordeal. The movie, “The Marcus-Nelson Murders,” based on a book by the New York Times reporter Selwyn Raab, was produced and written by Abby Mann, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Whitmore was paid a pittance for his cooperation. In the end, the movie is best remembered for having introduced a character named Detective Theo Kojak, played by the actor Telly Savalas. Mr. Savalas and Kojak would go down in the annals of TV history. Whitmore watched the movie from the medical ward at the Green Haven state prison in Dutchess County.

NINE years after his name was finally cleared and he’d been released from prison, Whitmore won a settlement of half a million dollars from the City of New York. But it was too little, too late. He’d been crushed by the system, his self-worth obliterated in ways that could never fully be put back together. He squandered the money he’d been awarded through bad business ventures and at the hands of devious friends and relatives. By the time I found Whitmore, he was living in poverty similar to what he’d known in those years before he was led into that police station in Brooklyn back in 1964.

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