On August 28, 1963, a 23-year-old Time-Life staffer named Patricia Tolles came home from work to find her apartment at 57 East 88th Street a ransacked mess.
That was the least of it. In a blood-soaked bedroom were the bodies of her roommates, 20-year-old Newsweek editorial researcher Janice Wylie (below) and 23-year-old teacher Emily Hoffert (right).
Wylie (who had been sexually assaulted) and Hoffert were bound, naked, and each brutally stabbed dozens of times.
The horrific murders shook the city, especially the thousands of young “career girls”—as they were called in the 1960s—who came to New York to share apartments and find jobs.
For months, cops had no leads, until April 1964, when a 19-year-old Brooklyn resident named George Whitmore was arrested.
Police were certain they had their man. But his confession was soon discredited, and investigators were back on the hunt for the real killer.
He finally emerged in October 1964. Heroin addict and convicted burglar Richard Robles, 20, who had grown up near the East 80s apartment where the three career girls lived, was charged in January 1965.
After a jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison, he told the judge he didn’t do it.
But during a parole hearing two decades later in 1986, Robles confessed to butchering the girls in a robbery-gone-wrong after Hoffert told him she was going to report him to the police. He was denied parole.
Ephemeral New York 