Echoes of My Soul (15 page)

Between the defense attorneys, wearing a gray suit coat, green sweater vest and button-down white shirt, but no tie, Richard Robles sat looking at the jury with no expression on his face. Nine months in the Tombs without heroin had improved the clarity of his eyes and he'd put on some weight, but the junkie pallor had only been traded in for the pasty white skin of jail. Still, they'd cleaned him up, and had given him a shave and a haircut. With his dark, wavy hair, long on top and clipped on the sides, combined with his boyish good looks, he could have passed for an English major at Columbia University. Sitting behind him in the first row behind the defense table were his common-law wife, Dolly Ruiz, and their young daughter.

As he looked at the defendant, in his head Glass could hear Robles's voice from the night of January 26:
“It wasn't panic. Something went wrong.”

“Something went wrong. Something went wrong.”
That statement had echoed in Glass's mind ever since. Something had indeed gone wrong, and now it was up to the prosecution to set it as right as possible.

“Mr. Keenan, are the People ready with your opening statement?” Judge Davidson inquired.

Keenan rose from his seat. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“Then please proceed.”

W
ith all eyes fixed on him, John Keenan stood before the jury and opened the trial of Richard Robles with a description of the building at 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, which he noted was “ten stories tall, with four apartments on each floor.” While most spectators, including the jurors, may have hardly noticed such a mundane beginning, Mel Glass smiled. Nothing Keenan did was without a reason—even if his motive wasn't clear at the moment.

A product of Jesuit schools, Keenan knew every fact of a case going in and used it to his best advantage. And in this trial, he'd relied on Glass both for his knowledge and his thoughts about how to go about prosecuting this most unusual case. They'd spent hours leading up to the trial discussing strategy, particularly how to combat the defense's main weapon, George Whitmore Jr.'s confession.

Keenan had begun implementing the strategy back during voir dire—the jury selection process that began on October 11. First he'd read the indictment to the prospective jurors, charging Robles with two counts of murder in the first degree: “The defendant in the County of New York, on or about August 28, 1963, willfully, feloniously and of malice aforethought struck and killed Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert with a knife.”

Then he gave a brief introduction of the case, including a small aside belittling the fact that expected “defense witness” George Whitmore Jr. had confessed to two crimes in Brooklyn “and then threw in this one, for good measure.” He didn't dwell on the subject long, though; he had to be careful about casting doubt on all confessions as the prosecution case also would be relying on statements Robles made on January 26.

After his description of the building in his opening, Keenan continued to pour the foundation for their plan as he spoke briefly about the three roommates in apartment 3C, and the morning of August 28, 1963. Almost offhandedly, he noted that Katherine Olsen took out the garbage before leaving for work, and “then closed and double-locked the service entrance door.”

Keenan then moved swiftly on to what the jurors could expect to learn from the Delaneys, and that they'd hear portions of many hours of tapes from the listening device the couple had consented to have planted in their apartment.

Without dwelling on any one topic, the senior assistant district attorney arrived at January 26, 1965, and the defendant's arrest and his subsequent statements to detectives: “I don't know, Downes. I went to pull a lousy burglary and I wound up killing two girls.”

Keenan strode over to the defense table, pointed at Richard Robles and graphically explained, “Simply stated, the People will prove that this defendant annihilated, slaughtered and raped a young, innocent, defenseless woman, Janice Wylie, in her apartment, and then brutally, virtually decapitated her roommate Emily Hoffert. All because he wanted a few bucks to satisfy his drug addiction.”

He ended by telling the jury to keep an open mind “until you've heard all of the evidence, because after everything has been presented, I will ask you in the name of the
People of the State of New York,
and in the interests of justice, to convict the defendant of the murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert.”

 

After Mack Dollinger waived his right to give an opening statement, John Keenan progressed to laying the bricks of the prosecution strategy with his first witness, John A. Farrell, a civil engineer who'd worked for the DAO since 1950.

Farrell brought two diagrams to the witness stand: one of the apartment, the other of the courtyards and passageways of the 57 East Eighty-eighth Street residence. The latter depicted the service stairwells and the vent shafts that ran up the back of the building between the service stairwell windows and the kitchen windows. He noted that the only entrance to the service stairwells in the lobby was through a lobby door that locked automatically and could only be opened from the stairwell side.

Keenan then moved quickly on to the next witness, Detective Nicholas Perrino, whose primary job was as a crime scene photographer. He identified a series of photographs that he'd taken in and around apartment 3C. Again, the witness described what the jury would see in the photographs—such as the back of the building or the frosted glass windows on the ground floor, which prevented people from seeing inside to the lobby—without any elaboration. However, at this time Keenan held back the photographs of the deceased women for later.

In rapid succession Keenan next called the witnesses who would set the scene for the events leading up to the horrific discovery of the two murder victims, such as Brierly Reybine, the young woman who worked with Janice Wylie at
Newsweek.
Reybine testified that she'd telephoned Janice first that morning, and then later in the afternoon when Janice didn't show up for work.

 

Then the senior ADA called Katherine Olsen Fagen to the stand. Pale and anxious, Olsen, who had since married and went by the name Fagen, settled onto the witness chair. Keeping her eyes on Keenan, she avoided looking at Robles. With the prosecutor guiding her, she reviewed the events of the morning—the arrival of the towels from Bloomingdale's, the excitement over the March on Washington, the telephone call that Janice picked up, and placing the trash on the service stairwell landing before “locking and bolting the door.”

It seemed like such an innocuous statement, yet Glass knew how important it was—not just to the prosecution case, but to Fagen. When he told her after the trial that they now knew beyond a doubt that she'd locked the door that morning, she sighed and then broke down into tears. For two years she'd heard the whispers and read the newspaper stories that implied that she'd left the door open and consequently contributed to the deaths of her roommates.

During witness preparation, Mel tried to encourage her to simply tell the truth and not worry about any other issues. She seemed relieved by his reassurance and sincere concern for her.

However, the relief did not prevent her from crying on the witness stand as she recalled coming home that evening and discovering the ransacked bedrooms, the bloody knife in the bathroom and the open kitchen stairwell door.

“Could you please tell us where in your apartment you kept your spoons, forks and knives?” Keenan asked.

“In the kitchen,” Fagen replied.

“Could you tell us precisely where?”

“We kept them in a drawer under the counter.”

“One last question in this area, Mrs. Fagen, was there a table in the kitchen?”

Fagen shook her head. “No, there was no table in the kitchen. It was too small a room.”

Without comment and matter-of-factly, Keenan moved on to the rest of her testimony. She recalled how she'd been asked to accompany a detective to the room where her friends lay butchered. Through tears and sobs, she recalled the horror of what she'd seen.

“Mrs. Fagen,” Keenan said gently, “did you ever speak to any detectives with the last names Bulger, Ayala or DiPrima?”

The young woman frowned as she dabbed at her eyes and nose. “I don't believe so,” she said. “I don't recall talking to anyone with those names.”

If anyone in the courtroom thought Keenan might give some clue as to why he had asked her about the Brooklyn detectives, they were going to have to wait.

After Katherine Fagen's brief cross-examination, she stepped down. Judge Davidson told Keenan to call his next witness.

“The People call Mr. Max Wylie.”

 

A hush fell over the courtroom as a frail, white-haired man, bent over as though under a great weight, entered the courtroom through a side door leading from the witness room. He blinked several times as if he hadn't expected such a large crowd, all of whom were staring at him. But he spotted John Keenan, who smiled reassuringly and gestured toward the witness stand; gathering himself, he walked haltingly past the first row of spectators into the well of the court and was led to the witness chair by the court clerk.

After Wylie was sworn in and took his seat, Keenan began his examination with a series of straightforward questions about his family life and work. From his answers the jurors learned that he and his wife, Lambert, had lived on 55 East Eighty-sixth Street for twenty-four years; they were also informed that Janice was born on March 6, 1942, and she had an older sister, Pamela. Wylie was employed by a Madison Avenue advertising firm, and that was where he'd spent August 28, 1963, at his desk, except for a short lunch break.

In fact, he'd been at his desk late that afternoon when he received a call from his worried wife. Janice had not shown up at work, and no one seemed to be able to reach her or knew her whereabouts. He'd gone home; and then after Kate Olsen called to say the apartment had been ransacked, he and his wife had hurried over to 57 East Eighty-eighth Street.

Stopping often to catch his breath and regroup, Max Wylie grieved as he relived the nightmare. Upon arriving at the apartment, he told his wife and Kate to remain in the living room; then he ventured down the hallway and looked into the first bedroom, “which was in a frightful disarray.” When he saw the bloody knife in the bathroom, then dreading each step, he walked down the hallway to the second bedroom, where he nudged the door open with his foot. Frightened by the room's chaotic state and the blood-covered bed, he'd forced himself farther in, until he saw the bodies.

“They were both close together,” he testified, his voice on the verge of cracking, the tears rolling down his cheeks. “The space was very confining. The body of Emily was dressed. The body of Janice was nude.”

Then he spotted a blue wool blanket at Emily's feet. “When I saw the mutilation of the girls, I feared it might be proper police procedure for them to ask Mrs. Wylie to see what I saw, and I pulled the blanket over both the girls' bodies, covering them as much as I could.”

Only now did Keenan hand Max Wylie two photographs—People's Exhibits 29 and 30.

Although he'd seen them before—indeed, he couldn't get those images out of his mind—Max Wylie looked like he'd been struck in the chest with a sledgehammer.

“Do these photographs fairly and accurately depict the scene in the bedroom inside apartment 3C that night?” Keenan asked.

Wylie nodded and tried to speak, but his voice at first came out as just a strangled cry. He took a deep breath and tried again. In a hushed tone, he answered, “Yes, that is what I saw.”

A few minutes later, Keenan wrapped up his examination of the witness. Notwithstanding all the cases he had tried, it was always painful—and in this case gut-wrenching—to have to call a member of the deceased's family to the stand. Particularly a mother or a father. But it was necessary because in every murder case, the prosecution had to prove two things: The deceased was, in fact, dead, and had died as a result of the criminal acts of the defendant. In order to satisfy the first criterion—even though in most homicide cases, and this one in particular, it was not an issue—the deceased, nevertheless, had to be identified by the family member, which usually happened when that individual was called to the morgue.

When Wylie was finally excused from the witness stand, Mel Glass stood up and then accompanied him back to the witness room. The grieving father looked at the young assistant district attorney. Wylie's eyes were welling with tears that he no longer fought to hold back.

“How'd I do?” he asked, and broke into sobs.

Stepping forward, Mel put his arm around the other man's shoulders. “You did fine, Max,” he said softly. “You did just fine.”

“H
e showed up at my pad a little before noon and said he was in trouble—that he'd just killed two girls.”

As he testified from the witness stand, Nathan “Jimmy” Delaney scratched the stubble on his chin and tugged at the unaccustomed tie around his neck. He glanced over at the defense table, where Richard Robles sat impassively staring back at him.

Delaney shook his head—whether that was out of sorrow or disgust, it was impossible to tell. The defendant, however, showed no emotion as he turned to look at the jurors.

Watching the exchange between the two former friends, Glass recalled the evening just slightly more than a year before when he first heard the Delaneys talk about the morning a bloodstained Ricky Robles came to their apartment. That had been followed by the confrontation in his office between the couple and the defendant. All of it set into motion a chain of events that culminated in Delaney's appearance on the witness stand.

 

Prior to Jimmy Delaney taking the stand that day, Detective John Lynch had been called to describe what he saw and what he did when he arrived the evening of August 28, 1963, at apartment 3C. As he walked the jurors through the apartment and into the bloodstained bedroom, the detective answered several seemingly innocuous questions from John Keenan, though Glass knew they were anything but throwaways.

Keenan made sure that the witness described the kitchen in detail: the open window, the open door “with no sign of forced entry,” the open drawer beneath the counter that contained forks, spoons and knives, the six-pack Pepsi container, with two bottles missing, the absence of a kitchen table. Similar attention was paid to the detective's recollection of the stairwell door that opened into the lobby: that there was no sign on the lobby side denoting where the door led, or if it was an exit; that it shut and locked itself automatically; and once shut, it could only be opened without a key from the stairwell side.

“It couldn't be opened from the lobby,” the detective added.

As Lynch discussed the condition of the murder room and the victims, Keenan asked him about the bloody eyeglasses on the bed and a jar of Noxzema lying on the ground. Then he inquired whether Lynch had seen a clock radio.

“Yes,” the detective replied, “it was stopped at ten thirty-seven
A.M
.”

When Lynch remarked that he'd seen a razor blade on the floor of the death room, Keenan asked him to describe the blade.

“It had arrows stamped on the side, indicating it came from a dispenser,” Lynch replied.

“Did you see a paper wrapper for a razor blade on the bathroom floor?”

Lynch frowned and shook his head. “No, there was no paper wrapper. Again, the blade was the sort you get out of a dispenser, not a wrapper.”

 

Under cross-examination Mack Dollinger questioned Detective Lynch about taking the photograph that was found on George Whitmore Jr. to Max Wylie and others in the early-morning hours after Whitmore's arrest. The detective agreed that Wylie denied the blonde in the photograph was Janice, and that he'd informed Captain Frank Weldon and Detective Edward Bulger of that fact.

As Glass listened, he knew this was the first glimpse into the defense scheme: The police knew right away that Whitmore had lied about the photograph. They couldn't convict him, so they had to set up the defendant as a stand-in.

Glass shook his head in disgust, knowing what was to come, because he had informed Mack Dollinger about the lack of identification on the photograph.

 

When Detective Lynch stepped down, Keenan continued by calling associate medical examiner (ME) Dr. Bela Dur and the renowned chief ME, Dr. Milton Helpern. One at a time, they testified regarding the cause of death of each of the girls, describing in explicit detail the number and type of wounds.

Lost, perhaps, in the horrific account of the autopsies were two notations that Helpern, a white-haired grandfatherly type, made about Janice Wylie. In one observation he stated that Noxzema had been smeared on Janice's genital and anal areas. In the other notation, he said that when the young woman was disemboweled, the killer had punctured her intestines three times, releasing digestive gases that would have caused a foul odor.

Glass watched the jurors' faces grimace at the chief medical examiner's remark, maybe wondering if such disturbing minutia was really necessary. But he knew when Jimmy Delaney was called to the stand that the stage was set. Every issue he and Keenan had discussed in their strategy sessions, every witness, diagram and photograph—no matter how ostensibly mundane—brought before the jury were metaphorically tiles in a mosaic. Each one was not of immediate evidentiary impact; but when put together in a finished picture, they would point inexorably to the defendant's guilt.

However, that was not readily apparent when thirty-six-year-old Jimmy Delaney began his testimony by answering questions about his personal background. Although he'd been a U.S. Marine, the witness admitted he'd been addicted to heroin since 1954 and had a long criminal history, which began in 1948 with a conviction for attempted robbery. Most of his other convictions were for minor drug possession and sales, but he'd spent most of his adult life in and out of jails and prisons, including thirty months in a federal penitentiary for the sale of narcotics.

With the biographic account out of the way, the real questioning began: “Could you tell the jury, please, if you saw the defendant on August 28, 1963?” Keenan asked.

“Yeah,” Delaney answered, turning to look at Robles. “He showed up at my pad a little before noon and said he was in trouble—that he'd just killed two girls.”

At first, Delaney testified, he was worried that Robles might have led the police to his apartment. His friend assured him, however, that he'd taken precautions. After fleeing from the murder scene, Robles said he'd taken a taxi downtown, got out, walked some distance and then caught another taxi back uptown to the West Side, and then another cab cross town to Delaney's apartment. All of this just in case the first taxi driver recalled picking up a possible suspect near the scene of a double murder.

Robles was carrying a paper bag when he arrived at the apartment. It contained a green sports shirt with blood on it and a pair of pink rubber gloves. He also had a bloodstain on his left pant leg. More blood had soaked through to the white T-shirt he was wearing beneath a jacket, the killer said, he had gotten from his victims' apartment.

“He wanted a change of clothing, so I gave him pants and a shirt,” Delaney told the jurors.

The defendant had also wanted heroin and handed over some cash that he claimed he got from the purse of one of the victims. Leaving his wife behind with Robles, the witness said, he was gone about forty-five minutes before returning with the drugs.

When he got back to the apartment, Robles and his wife were talking about the murders. “He said he made one of them give him a blow job.”

The three addicts shot up the heroin, after which the defendant left the apartment. But he'd returned about ten that night with the clothes he'd borrowed and a newspaper that already had a story about the murder of the two young women who'd been stabbed to death in their Upper East Side apartment. “He said those were the girls he'd been talking about.”

The defendant returned again the next day with more newspapers, which now had photographs of the victims. “I asked why he had to kill the girls.... One was pretty attractive. He told me that she wasn't as attractive as the newspaper made her out to be.”

“Did he tell you how he got into the apartment?” Keenan asked.

“Yeah, he said he got in through the kitchen window,” Delaney answered. “He went out a stairwell window and stepped on a vent so he could reach the windowsill and pulled himself up.”

At the prosecution table, Glass glanced at the jurors to see how they'd reacted to the answer. He could almost sense their minds collectively recognizing the mosaic falling together: recalling the photographs of the back of the building, Detective Lynch's description of the open kitchen window and Kate Fagen's testimony that she double-locked the service door after she took out the garbage.

 

John Keenan's examination of the witness wore into the late afternoon and then into the next morning. Delaney testified that Richard Robles told him that as he was sexually assaulting the blonde, the girl with the thick glasses came in. “He told her to take them off, but she wouldn't. She said she wanted to be able to identify him.”

The jurors listened raptly as the witness recalled Robles's description of his actions after he decided that the women had to die: striking them on the head with the Pepsi bottles, the frenzy of slashing and stabbing that followed.

“One of the girls took a long time to die. He said he had to stab her several times up through her stomach to get to her heart.”

Glass knew there wasn't a juror who wasn't thinking of Dr. Helpern's testimony regarding the odor emitted when Delaney added, “Robles said the smell was awful—so bad he almost threw up.”

Covered with blood and gore, the killer had then gone into the bathroom, where he took a shower and cleaned the knife, which he left on the sink, Delaney testified Robles had told him and Margie.

As the defense would have certainly raised the issue if Keenan had not, the prosecutor asked what had brought Delaney to the attention of the police in the Wylie-Hoffert murders.

“I killed a drug pusher named Cruz,” Delaney admitted. “It was self-defense. He hit me with a steel rod.”