Jan. 26, 1965 - Tight-lipped New York City authorities who have been insisting for nine months that the killer of career girls Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert is in jail arrested a second suspect as the “real” murderer tonight, and today they asked a judge to drop the charges against the first youth.
Assistant D.A. Alexander Herman told Supreme Court Justice Mitchell Schweitzer today the state no longer wanted to prosecute George Whitmore for the Wylie-Hoffert murders, which occurred Aug. 28, 1963, because his confession “has now been demonstrated not to be fact.” Schweitzer signed the discharge order, but Whitmore still was not free. He faces trial for another murder in Brooklyn.
A 22-year-old drug addict and convicted burglar, Richard Robles (pictured center), was charged with homicide tonight in the brutal double slaying that shocked the city 18 months ago.
Robles lives eight blocks from the East Side apartment house in which the two girls were assaulted and stabbed to death. His arrest tonight, following three months of surveillance, stemmed from a tip given police last October by a fellow addict and pal of Robles who was arrested on an unrelated charge.
The second addict, Nathan Delaney, 35, told police Robles had come to his apartment the day of the killings, covered with blood and looking for a fix, and said: “I need a shot real bad. I just killed two women.”
Detectives obtained a court order to wiretap the apartments of Robles and Delaney and secured enough evidence to arrest him.
Robles had been released from Sing Sing prison only a month before the double slaying. Police said he had committed numerous burglaries and had been serving five to 10 years for assault and burglary when he was paroled.
Delaney told detectives Robles had been prowling in the building on the fatal day when he found the service entrance to the Wylie-Hoffert apartment open. When he entered, Miss Wylie, 21, an employee of Newsweek magazine and nice of author Philip Wylie, grabbed a bedsheet and wrapped it around herself. Detectives said the suspect molested Miss Wylie and then dragged her into the bedroom of Miss Hoffert, a schoolteacher, who was not in the apartment at that time.
When Miss Hoffert, 22, returned, the killer seized her and tied the girls together. At that point, according to Delaney, Miss Hoffert may have unwittingly provoked the killings. She allegedly shouted furiously: “I have seen you. I’ll remember you. You’re not going to get away with this.”
Stricken with panic, the suspect smashed the girls’ skulls with soda bottles and then stabbed them repeatedly, detectives said.
Delaney told detectives this story Oct. 3 after he was arrested in the killing of a dope pusher. They reportedly had Delaney coax the story out of Robles again after his apartment had been bugged.
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