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Negroes, the Glen Oak. Parker Johnson went to Wildwood High School and then to an all-Negro university near Philadelphia, where he majored in psychology and penology. After graduation, Johnson returned to Wildwood and joined the police force. By the early 1960s, he was well known to Negrofamilies in the area. At the age of forty-nine, he had become something of a role model to black kids like George Whitmore. Sometimes he would stop by school playgrounds and shoot baskets with the kids. Johnson got to know many of the area’s Negro youths on a first-name basis—the good kids and the bad. Of Whitmore he would later recall: “Young George was a humble type of individual—meek, never went around with anybody, kept to himself. He was never in any trouble.”
    Lieutenant Johnson knew the Whitmore family; their wood shack near the auto cemetery was a far cry from his pleasant two-family house with yard and garage, but the lieutenant wasn’t the kind of person to look down on anyone. At the station house that night, he pulled George Whitmore aside. “Now, George, you know better than to be hanging out with those troublemakers. I never want to see you in this station house again. I’m gonna let you go, but you remember what I told you.”
    George nodded. “Yes sir, Mister Parker. Thank you, sir.”
    He didn’t think much about it at the time, but years later, an older and wiser George Whitmore would reflect on the role Lieutenant Parker Johnson played in his life: “I got to thinking all cops were like Mister Parker. They wanted to help you. If you told them the truth and helped them out, they’d treat you right.”
    The good lieutenant had inspired in George a willingness—a desire, even—to trust the police without question. Whitmore had no way of knowing it at the time, but it was this inclination—what some of his fellow black citizens might describe as naïveté—that would lead him down a road of unfathomable tribulation.

[ two ]
BUSINESS AS USUAL
    AT THE TIME of the Career Girls Murders, Bill Phillips was a detective assigned to the Seventeenth Detective Squad, headquartered on the second floor of the Seventeenth Precinct station house on East Fifty-first Street. The Seventeen was south of the Twenty-third Precinct, where the Wylie-Hoffert killings had taken place. Like dozens of cops working the East Side, Phillips was momentarily roped into the investigation, assigned to canvass the neighborhood. The detective made the rounds, asking store owners, residents, and doormen in the area whether they’d seen anything unusual around the time of the double homicide. Everyone in the area knew about the murders. “Horrifying,” said a deli owner on Madison Avenue. “I’m so disturbed I can’t sleep at night,” said the doorman of a building nearby on Fifth Avenue. Everyone expressed shock, some expressed fear, but few had seen anything useful on the day of the slaughter.
    Phillips was inclined to believe the tabloids’ conclusion about the crime—that one of the girls, Janice Wylie, was a cock teaser, and that some man she brought home from a bar or nightclub had raped and killed her. When her roommate walked in on things, this scenario went, the perpetrator killed her, too; then, in some kind of postcoital rage, he decided to butcher the bodies. Phillips heard the local police gossip surrounding the case, but he didn’t know much more than what he read in the papers or saw on TV at night. It was a major event for the New YorkPolice Department, but not for Bill Phillips, who wasn’t one of the lead investigators on the case. He had other priorities.
    Phillips, age thirty-three, was a seven-year veteran of the department. He spent most of his day roaming the precinct looking for ways to score—that is, to extort, extract via bribe, or flat out steal money from local residents, guilty or innocent, living or