[2] The actions of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) led Whitmore to be improperly accused of this and other crimes, including the murder of Minnie Edmonds and the attempted rape and assault of Elba Borrero.

Janice had been stabbed in the chest and lower abdomen, the latter wounds causing partial evisceration, while Emily had been knifed in the neck.

The media dubbed it the "Career Girls Murders" because Janice worked as a Newsweek researcher and Emily was a schoolteacher.

As such, they were representative of the thousands of young women who had come from all over the United States to larger cities like New York to seek jobs and careers.

[6][7] Police theorized that Janice had been the killer's intended victim because she was found naked and had facial cream smeared in her genital area.

Brooklyn detectives Joe DiPrima and Edward Bulger jumped to the conclusion that the blonde in the photo was Janice, although her family later denied it.

[13] The NYPD announced Whitmore's confession in the Career Girl Murders, as well as the unrelated killing of Minnie Edmonds and the attempted rape of Elba Borrero.

[14] Police also stated that Whitmore had drawn a detailed diagram of the apartment and had in his wallet a photo of Janice that had been stolen from the flat.

[5][15][16] Whitmore repudiated his confessions, claiming he had been beaten during the interrogations; that legal counsel had not been present; and that his request for a lie detector test had been denied.

[15] Witnesses were located claiming Whitmore had been in Wildwood, New Jersey, at the time of the Wylie-Hoffert murders, watching a live television broadcast of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington, which occurred that same day.

Facing the possibility of the death penalty, Delaney offered to make a deal: in return for leniency, he would give police the name of the real killer of Wylie and Hoffert, claiming it was not Whitmore.

Delaney explained to police that on the day of the killings he had met an old acquaintance, Richard "Ricky" Robles, who had told him that he had committed the murders.

[19] Delaney told detectives that Robles had turned up at his apartment on the day of the killings, demanding drugs while his hands and clothes were covered in blood.

His defense attempted to buoy the credibility of Whitmore's confession to create a reasonable doubt that their own client had committed the crime.

He went to the apartment’s kitchen and grabbed butcher knives with which he stabbed and slashed at their inert bodies, disemboweling Janice and nearly decapitating Emily.

Just months before, the New York Legislature had abolished the death penalty, except in the cases of the killing of police officers, prison guards and murders committed while escaping jail.

Police detectives, who may have been motivated by their sense of justice, resorted to highly questionable means to extract a confession from a suspect who was too weak to resist.

Their colossal blunders in the career girls murder case almost put George Whitmore Jr. on death row for a crime he certainly did not commit.

No formal charges were ever brought against Detectives Bulger and DiPrima who consistently denied any wrongdoing in the case, but exactly how Whitmore was able to supply a 61-page confession to a double murder he never committed was never explained.

Despondent over the deaths of the three women in his life, Max Wylie committed suicide by gunshot in 1975 in a motel room in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Prior to this, he was New York State Inmate #66A0003, imprisoned in the Greene Correctional Facility and had been denied parole multiple times.