The Savage City by T. J. English

Wylie-Hoffert murders and get the perp to regurgitate it all back to the investigators. Now came the hardest part: Whitmore would have to give his statement to an assistant district attorney and have it recorded by a stenographer.
    Assistant district attorneys arrived from both the Brooklyn and Manhattan D.A.’s offices. Whitmore would have to give three separate statements for the three separate crimes. These statements would become the official version in the state’s case against the accused, to be used by prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and jury members. They had to be perfect.
    The Borrero and Edmonds confessions went off without a hitch. Seated in the squad commander’s office, with the assistant D.A. and a stenographer on one side of him and detectives on the other, Whitmore gave his name, address, and date of birth, and was then led through the details of the crimes. Recalled Whitmore:
    People say you must have a wonderful memory to remember all that, but it weren’t so hard. Most of the questions I could tell where they were goin’ cause I had good schoolin’ on that. Whenever I got into trouble and forgot my answer, I’d look sideways at my detectives and they’d hint me with shakin’ their head or scratchin’ their nose or somethin’ like that. I think even one time they whispered an answer to me.
    Getting the Borrero and Edmonds confession down on paper took about an hour. The Wylie-Hoffert confession was more problematic. To make the case as airtight as possible, Bulger had filled Whitmore’s head with minute details about the case. It could be confusing, but the detectives had worked out a system with George so he could keep some of the details straight.
    My detectives told me if anybody ask you, the first girl you seen is the baby girl and the second one who comes in later is the mother. That’s the way I can keep the girls straight in my memory. So I make believe to myself the left hand is the baby girl and the right one is the mother and when he ask me ’bout the first girl I make a fist with my left hand when he ask me ’bout the second girl I make a fist with my right for the mother. A game, kind of. That’s my whole story. That’s the whole story of a Negro boy who never hurt nobody, in the police precinct on Friday that April.
    The assistant D.A. from Manhattan was Peter Koste. He should have been suspicious when the detectives warned him ahead of time that Whitmore probably believed that Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were still alive. That was the first of many details that went against normal protocol. It was within Koste’s job description to question the detectives about their methods of interrogation, but Koste found himself in a Brooklyn precinct surrounded by two dozen detectives and high-ranking police officials, all of whom could hardly contain their excitement at the prospect of breaking the case. As far as these men were concerned, taking down Whitmore’s confession was a formality. Koste was expected to do his part.
    It was a nerve-racking process. George had been prepared well, but occasionally there were details that he and the detectives hadn’t gone over. For instance, at one point Assistant D.A. Koste asked Whitmore about the building at 57 East Eighty-eighth Street.
    Q: What kind of building?
    A: About a four-story house.
    Q: Four-story house, you think it was?
    A: Yes.
    Q: What did you do when you spotted this four-story house? You think it was four stories?
    A: Four or five stories.
    Apparently, the number of stories in the building had never come up. At this point, as the finished transcript noted, “Detective Bulger leaves room.” Twenty questions later, Bulger returned and the questioning veered back to the height of the building.
    Q: You mentioned that this building was about four or five stories, could it have been eight or ten stories?
    A: I don’t know if it’s that high or